2023-07-07 06:31:50
Tousled hair, enraptured gaze from bright eyes, sensually pressed lips, an angelic face that’s a sly old dog: the iconic portrait of Arthur Rimbaud, photographed when he was just seventeen, can be found on every corner in Charleville-Mézières. The obstinate face of the ingenious, scandal-ridden poet adorns posters, coffee mugs, T-shirts, packages of chocolates, and beer bottles.
Schools, streets, hairdressing salons and street snack bars are named after him. The rebellious man of letters had nothing but scorn for the place in the French Ardennes where he was born in 1854. “My hometown is beyond any small provincial town in idiocy,” he sneered at the petit-bourgeois milieu of Charleville-Mézières, which he mockingly dubbed “Charlestown.”
I hope for sun, travel, adventure
But Rimbaud felt a deep love-hate relationship with his rural home region on the Franco-Belgian border, to which he was drawn again and again until his death in 1891. His spiritual and amorous companion, Paul Verlaine, from Metz and ten years his senior, also spent many years in the Ardennes, where his father’s family came from.
As different as their attitude to this rough borderland was, it inspired the sensitive poets and was central to their literary revolution. The 300-kilometre Rimbaud-Verlaine route on both sides of the border allows you to discover the scenes where the works, revolts, tragedies and excesses of the two “poètes maudits”, the ostracized poets, took place.
The route starts in Charleville-Mézières, where you can only see the outside of Rimbaud’s birthplace in the pedestrian zone. He was the second of five children whose father, an infantry officer, retired early. Vitalie Cuif, the callous and pious mother, came from a peasant family and brought up her children with unrelenting severity. On the Place Jacques Félix is the high school named after Rimbaud, where he wrote his first works as a precocious poet.
The revolt was already seething in him on the class bench: “I am alienated, uprooted, angry, stupid, upset. I was hoping for sun, endless wandering, travelling, adventure, bohemian life.” In the square in front of the station stands a sculpture by Rimbaud, surrounded by plaques in the asphalt with excerpts from his poems. It is no coincidence that this place was chosen for a homage. It was here that Rimbaud boarded the train at the age of sixteen in order to set off secretly in the direction of Paris. It was the first of his many escapes and, since he was traveling without a ticket, he was immediately arrested and fined.
An irony of history
The Musée Arthur Rimbaud is housed in one of the most magnificent buildings in Charleville-Mézières. The old mill on the banks of the Maas, which with its baroque columns is more reminiscent of a small castle, was built in 1626 by Prince Charles de Gonzague, the influential nephew of King Henry IV, who developed the city, which took his first name, into a progressive commercial centre wanted. The culmination of his urban vision is the Place Ducale, which, with its ocher pavilions and wide arcades, is a true-to-scale copy of the famous Place des Vosges in Paris.
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