It is acknowledged by many that the year 1887 was the high point of Paul Verlaine's suffering. It served as a turning point, symbolising the lowest of lows; the remaining years of his life were undoubtedly marked by crises, alcoholism, hospitalisation and financial difficulties. Nevertheless, the competing attentions of his two closest confidants, Eugènie Krantz and Philomène Boudin, the occasional help of last-resort sponsors, and his belated recognition as a ‘the prince of poets' by the young bohemian community ensured that he would not sink into the same depths of poverty and hopelessness that he had experienced during that tumultuous year.
By September, he was on the verge of starvation, but he never stopped writing, whether in Cochin or in the hospitals of Vincennes and Tenon. He gathered together old writings and new pieces for a collection he was working on for his publisher, Vanier, to be published in 1889, the dark counterpart to his 1880 collection "Sagesse", in which he immortalised his fervour as a newly converted individual.The title of this forthcoming collection would define the poet's entire life: "Parallèlement". Paul Verlaine, the unwitting adventurer, husband of Mathilde and lover of Rimbaud, teaching in England without a university degree, dissipated and mystical, a true believer and a hypocrite, the chanter of "sweetness, sweetness, sweetness" who tried to murder his mother and his wife in alcoholic fits. The eternally mischievous and sad child who used to play knife-fights with Arthur during their walks in London, and who was always untruthful in his confessions when he sought the truth. The owner of farms without any knowledge of agriculture, a man terrified of loneliness, who quarrelled with all his friends, who desperately tried to settle down as a quiet bourgeois, but who constantly moved between two lodgings run by old prostitutes, companions in eternal absinthe binges.
Yes, Paul Verlaine, poet of the great "Parallèlement".
From the depths of his downfall.
Although generations of French schoolchildren have been learning by heart how "les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne, ont blessé leur coeur d'une langueur monotone" (the long sobs of the autumn violins have wounded their hearts with a monotonous languor), Verlaine is still insidiously overshadowed by the poisonous Baudelaire and the comet Rimbaud, not to mention the patriarch Hugo. Some of these "songs" may seem easy to understand: "Il pleure dans mon coeur. Comme il pleut sur la ville" (It weeps in my heart. Like it rains on the city), but he is not easy to catch, the wretch. He who, at fourteen, dedicated his first poem to Victor Hugo and sent it to him by post, who, at twenty, wrote an important study on Baudelaire, who, as we know, made Rimbaud famous during his lifetime and after his death. And it was in 1887, in the depths of his decline, that Verlaine received the dreadful news: Arthur was dead! (News that we know to be false, since Rimbaud would not die until 1891, amputated and exhausted in a hospital in Marseilles, having just returned from his adventures in Abyssinia.) So Paul writes Laeti et Errabundi, poetry about Rimbaud, to be included in Parallèlement, which could be translated as The Happy Walkers. He recalls. "The races were fearless [...] We go, - do you remember, traveller, where it disappeared? - Turning lightly in the ethereal air. Two happy spirits, one would have thought! [...] Among other reprehensible excesses, I think we drank of everything [...] Our beautiful curiosities could have devoured all poetry".
A cry of passionate love
Laeti et Errabundi is a poem rarely mentioned by commentators, unlike Crimen Amoris (Crime of Love), written a few years earlier about "the most beautiful of all these bad angels", which made Verlaine a "sad sinner" who called on "the merciful God who will protect us from evil". In 1887, God was no longer present, but memories of "tiger-like" loves, in this "novel of coexistence" which mixes sunsets and sunrises, Paul Verlaine, on the verge of death, thunders: "All this past burning is still in my veins and in my brain and radiates and shines on my ever new fervour !" And God here is the other. "I refuse to believe in this. I forbid you, you god among demigods! Those who say so are fools. You, my great shining sin, are dead". Paul throws these exclamation marks as if they could resurrect "the man with the soles of the wind" in a cry of mad love quite different from his poetry of whispering, of touching, of almost, of somewhere vaguely dancing.
Mortal, incapable of ever overcoming his weaknesses, guilty of all the evils that would "cancel" him today, an elusive poet in his parallel path of writing the most pious verses and the most obscene, able to combine in one breath absolute delicacy and the most notorious bad taste. Paul with the hideous head, as he thought of himself, the lazy bad student, as he defined himself, who dragged his faun-like face from prisons to hospitals, from cabarets to holy water font, never letting go of the endless corrections of his manuscripts that did not sell. Paul, whose first poem, sent to Hugo at the age of fourteen, was called La Mort, and whose very last, written in December 1895, was called Mort !
Where to place him? Unlike comets and stars, " Verlaine ? He is hidden among the grass, Verlaine ", wrote Mallarmé in his poem Tombeau. Perhaps France's greatest poet.