Paul Verlaine, cursed poet

Paul Verlaine, one of the greatest French poets, was only 24 years old when the collection “Saturnian Poems” was published in 1866, which includes “Autumn Poem,” in the section called “Sad Landscapes.” I have translated it:

Autumn song
Long sobs
Of lights
Basto
My heart is wounded.
as a sign of
You will die.

I will choke you all.
And white as chalk, as
My time is limited,
I remember
Past stages
And my tears flow

And then I will go and leave.
Evil spirit
Expelled
For this past, for another past,
like
Deciduous leaf.

(From French: Orna Lieberman)

Paul Verlaine's famous poem elaborates on the significance of the autumn season as a harbinger of death. Simple words, mostly everyday, populate three short stanzas, quantifying the bad life of a weary, weary, and melancholic person who is led to helplessness and death. The poem's power seems to come from its simplicity and conciseness. General statements, which may sound banal, about the finite time of life and the stigma of being thrown away, are transformed under Verlaine's hand, by a secret alchemy, into personal, original, piercing, and dramatic statements of pure poetry. The howls of the wind are heard as violin laments that pierce the poet's heart. The mournful violinist resembles the sounds of church bells that herald a person's death. From the wounded heart, the pallor of death spreads throughout the body. The slow weariness tightens into a suffocating ring. The hands of the clock move toward the fateful hour that will soon ring. The poet is nothing but a plaything in the hands of the evil spirit, both inside and out. His sobbing sighs answer the violin's wails. He resigns himself to his fate and abandons himself to the evil spirit, like a fluttering leaf, swaying this way and that according to the whims of a higher power.

The poem that began with a humanized landscape ends with a man desired. The last image, the poet as a leaf, completes the merging of the inner landscape with the outer landscape, and even more so. The mirror that nature presented to the poet becomes his tomb. It is not for nothing that the last word in the poem is “dead” – a fallen leaf in French is called “dead leaf” – Feuille morte. The poem unites Verlaine’s three great loves – music, painting and writing – and all of them are dominated by an abysmal existential anguish and an incessant need for revenge that led him to self-destruction and loss. 

Did the young Verlaine know what kind of character he would have in the twenty-seven years he would have to live until his time came? The poet was convinced that his fate was predetermined by the harmful influence of the planet Saturn, hence the name of the collection “Saturnian Poems.” Or perhaps he himself determined his fate by removing all personal responsibility and casting the blame on higher powers.

Paul Verlaine's youth

For thirteen long years, his parents awaited his birth after three miscarriages. All three fetuses were preserved in jars of alcohol, in the family living room, above the fireplace. Paul-Marie was born in 1844 in the city of Metz to a wealthy bourgeois family. An only son whose birth was a blessing from heaven. This is evidenced by his name, Paul-Marie – Marie to thank the Holy Mary to whom his believing mother prayed and asked her to save her from her infertility. Two years earlier, his parents had adopted an orphaned cousin, Elise. Elise was the daughter of his mother's sister, and when she died shortly after her birth, the family took her in and raised her as a daughter. In 1851, Verlaine's father decided to retire from the Napoleonic army, where he had served as a successful officer, and the family moved to Paris in order to give Paul the best education that would ensure his future. Paul frequents the cafes of the capital, befriends the poets of the Parnassian school (Les Parnassiens) and drinks absinthe. He is secretly in love with his cousin Elise and hopes to marry her, but she marries a wealthy industrialist, owner of a sugar factory in the north. FranceWith his generous assistance, he publishes his first collection, “Sabbath Poems,” in which his admiration for Baudelaire is evident. The book is ignored by critics, with the exception of a few venomous darts and a sympathetic article by Anatole France, and the five hundred copies printed with his own funds are almost unsold. In time, as is well known, the insignificant collection will become one of the most famous and widely read collections of poetry in the entire world.

During the summer holidays, Paul spends time at the home of Eliza, the object of his pure love, and during the rest of the year he drinks and visits prostitutes. Paul's father, aware of his son's instability and worried about his future, puts him in the city hall. Paris As a clerk. Paul lives with his parents, and after his father's death, in 1865, he continues to live with his mother, with whom he maintains a problematic relationship and even physically harms her. Paul is accused of attempted murder, and this several times. The death of the father, who served as a barrier and a dam for the son's weaknesses, confronts Paul with a mother who does not prevent his only son from doing anything and is ready to do his every wish.

On his mother's advice, he married 1870-year-old Mathilde Motte in 17, and a year later their son Georges was born (his health would be poor, he would work like clockwork and die in 1926 without leaving any children). Paul hoped that his young and well-to-do wife, a member of a strictly bourgeois family, would cure him of his debauched life, his tendency to bitter drinking, dark jokes and young men who were on the move. Paul's wedding was attended by the famous revolutionary Louise Michel, who had been Mathilde's teacher. The days were the turbulent days of the Paris Commune. Paul and his wife did not actively intervene in the rebellion, but their affections were with the Communards. To save their lives, they had to flee the capital, from the terror of the government forces, the "army of the Versailles", who suppressed the rebels with force of hand (twenty thousand dead).

wandering

The couple returns to Paris. Paul is torn between his wife Mathilde and the poet Arthur Rimbaud. He leaves his wife for the young lover and lives with him for two turbulent years of wandering in England and Belgium. Paul threatens to murder his mother, his partner, and then commit suicide. Fortunately, he only partially carries out his threats. In 1873, Paul shoots Arthur, slightly wounding him in the left wrist. Paul is arrested, tried, and serves a term of imprisonment in a prison in Brussels and then in Mons, where he writes poems steeped in his renewed faith in the Catholic religion that he nourished in his parents' home from his devout mother, a kind of "repentance" attempt that expresses a sincere and deep, albeit temporary, aspiration for moral purity. Paul, as an eternal child, needs boundaries. The prison walls are good for him by protecting him from the temptations of the outside world. The poet will find a similar shield against his weaknesses at the end of his life within the walls of the hospitals where he will be frequently hospitalized.

In 1875, Paul is released from prison, a year earlier thanks to good behavior, and tries to restore his marriage to Mathilde, but she, who has been severely damaged by his violence, drunkenness, and infidelity, is determined to separate from her abusive husband, who always returns to his song despite his promises and pleas, and obtains a divorce and custody of their son. Georges will have no real relationship with his father, another severe blow to Paul, who, along with his life of lawlessness, paradoxically yearned for a stable family life. The image of a leaf carried by the wind to one place or another that the poet conceived in his youth wonderfully foresaw the way his future life would unfold. In 1875, Paul settles near London and accepts a position as a teacher of French, Latin, Greek, and drawing. After two years of teaching, also in other cities in England, he returns to France, continues teaching in various cities there and begins a relationship with one of his students, Lucien Letnoy.

The two are expelled from school and migrate to England and back to France. The affair ends tragically in 1883, when the couple dies of typhus at the age of 33. Another severe blow to Paul, who pays tribute to his “adopted son,” as he called him, in 25 poems. The story of the scandalous relationship with the student also involves the loss of the inheritance that the father left to his wife and son. Verlaine’s mother, who fulfilled all his dreams, bought him a farm in the Ardennes region where Lucien’s parents settled. Verlaine rented a house near the farm, which is opposite an inn-cafe. The group tried their hand at farming, but their venture failed and the farm was sold at a loss. The inn where the poet who wanted to be a farmer used to visit, write, paint, eat, drink, and get drunk is now, after quite a few upheavals, a museum dedicated to Verlaine and a cultural center.

“The Cursed Poets”: Literary Success and Life in Destitution

Paul's mother buys Lucien's parents, who have lost their son, a new house, thus emptying her of a significant portion of her money again. Mother and son settle together in the same village in the Ardennes. Paul gets drunk, corrupts peasant sons, threatens his mother with murder again, and is imprisoned again in a regional prison. In 1882, Paul returns to Paris and tries to find his place as a public official, as he did at the beginning of his life. But after an investigation, his application is rejected. The information coming from Brussels does not allow the administration to employ a man with such a heavy legal case (at that time, homosexuality was forbidden in France, and was considered an even more serious offense than the two famous gunshots that slightly wounded Rimbaud). However, in 1884 Verlaine published an essay, “The Accursed Poets” (Les Poètes maudits), in which he sketched the portraits of Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. The book was a great success, and in 1888 an expanded version was published, including three additional portraits, including that of Verlaine himself.

Paul finally emerges from obscurity, his collections of poems gain, thanks to the book of criticism, a late renaissance and establish him as one of the greatest representatives of the decadent and symbolist movement. Verlaine himself did not attach much significance to these terms. He spoke at length about their ambiguity in a lecture on the poetry of his time that he gave in The Hague, on November 4, 1892. However, although he did not particularly suffer from the indifference with which his books had been received up to that point, he greatly enjoyed the attention that he suddenly received. After the death of Le Comte de Lille, leader of the Parnassus School, Verlaine receives from his colleagues the honorable title of “Prince of Poets,” which will pass after his death to Stéphane Mallarmé. His candidacy for the French Academy, to succeed the chair of the historian Hippolyte Ten, who died in 1893, is rejected. In addition to literary criticism, Verlaine also publishes other prose texts, much less known to the general public, mostly autobiographical, including "Louise Leclerc", "Memoirs of a Widower", "My Prisons", "My Hospitals" and "Confessions".

Surprisingly, his sudden success as a writer does not guarantee him a decent living. In 1886, after the death of his mother, Paul was forced to give all that was left of his fortune to his ex-wife Mathilde because he had never paid her alimony, and was left destitute. And not only that. The few pennies he would earn from writers' fees for this or that poem, from a small fee for this or that lecture he was invited to give, would be robbed from him by dubious women with whom he socialized and in whom he placed his trust. Paul, as usual, swayed like a leaf from one past to another. A nail-biting fight broke out between his two girlfriends, Philomene Boden, a prostitute, and Eugenie Kranz, a former dancer and current saleswoman in a clothing store, for their right to wrest everything possible from the unfortunate poet. Paul deteriorates further, plunging into the abyss of absinthe, further and further ruining his already precarious health, being hospitalized in one hospital or another, reaching the point of starvation. A friend who met him two weeks before his death describes him painfully as a rickety, staggering, pitiful, and discouraging beggar who wandered around the Place de l'Odeon in a battered and faded hat, a tattered coat, and gaping shoes. In his pocket were a few pennies he had received from his publisher, with which he was happy to invite his friend to a restaurant in the district. Paul Verlaine died a pauper before he was about to receive a regular monthly stipend from his artist friends that was supposed to allow him to end his life with dignity.

The end of a cursed poet

From 1891, Paul linked his life with that of the former music hall dancer, Eugenie Krantz, unkempt, wrinkled and grumpy, who had seen better days, and all she wanted was to rob Morlan of his money. He walked around in torn clothes and worn-out shoes until his inevitable end, at the age of 51, in 1896. Friends say that after a loud quarrel with Eugenie Krantz, she left him on the floor of an unheated room on a particularly cold night, thinly dressed. The neighbors heard his groans, but who interferes in quarrels? The next morning, Eugenie Krantz found him in the same place where she had left him, on the floor, dying. As in the second stanza of the prophetic “Autumn Song,” the poet ended his life groaning, suffocating and pale as lime. He died towards evening, in the two-room apartment he had moved into two weeks earlier – after endlessly moving from one squalid place to another – where he had hoped to find rest after the hardships of his wanderings over the past 25 years. On the second floor of the house at 39 Rue de Kert lies his body, his emaciated neck adorned with a fine black tie worn by his loyal friends.
His coffin passed in front of the opera house on its way to the cemetery. The night after the funeral, a mysterious event occurred, according to the newspapers. The arm of the goddess of song and the harp she was holding, from the group of allegorical statues on the opera roof, were found crushed at the exact spot where the funeral procession had passed…

Paul Verlaine's successors

A multitude of artistic abilities – painting, writing, music, acting, cinema – combined with a tendency to debauchery, drinking, smoking, and violence also characterized the revered singer, Serge Gainsbourg.
(1928-1991), one of whose well-known songs, Serge Gainsbourg "I have come to tell you that I am leaving" (Je suis venu te dire que je m'en vais) draws its inspiration from "Autumn Song" and even explicitly mentions Verlaine's name.

Many other singers and musicians were influenced by “Autumn Song,” not to mention those who sang it, composed, written, and spoken (many of Verlaine’s songs were set to music by various musicians, including Claude de Bussy, who composed thirteen of them). It is not surprising that Gainsbourg, like many other artists, admired Verlaine and adapted his song.

But it was not necessarily expected that the first verse of “Autumn Song” would go down in history as the code text used by Radio London, on June 1 and 5, 1944, before The Normandy Invasion, to inform one of the French Resistance networks, nicknamed VENTRILOQUIST (“ventriloquist” means speaking from the belly), of the date of the start of the operation. Many hundreds of coded messages intended for the underground networks were spoken via the BBC, but Verlaine’s poem is the most famous of them. More precisely: on June 1, the code “Long moans of violins in autumn” was spoken to give the signal to Philippe de Vomécourt’s men to sabotage and destroy the railways leading to Normandy in order to prevent the Germans from rushing to help their soldiers. On June 5, the code “My heart is wounded as a sign of weariness” confirms the previous message. And this historical fact is added to the signs of honor given to Paul Verlaine…