Disaster Was My God (28 page)

S
o great was their passion and optimism that they married just a week after the Germans invaded in the summer of 1870—indeed, even as the Huns were trampling Mme. Rimbaud’s rye and her youngest son was plotting his escape.

In Paris, however, it was not seen as a war per se. It was, rather, a summer’s escapade. No one dreamed that in a mere two months the
French army would collapse, that Napoleon III would be dethroned, and that Paris—always on the verge in those years—would tumble into civil chaos. But so it did unravel after Napoleon III, the aggressor, met his final humiliating rout in Sedan, on the Belgian border. When the Huns tried their triumphal march into Paris, armed mobs, outraged at their feckless government, resisted, then rose in armed rebellion against both the Germans and the government. It was a revolt of the workers and the poor—the Communards—indeed the first revolution ever to take up the red banners of socialism. Within days, enormous barricades of paving stones, timbers, rubble, and bricks blocked the streets. Already well armed with rifles and ammunition, the home guard seized the city’s cannons, even as the Germans blocked food and fuel shipments and the dithering French government plotted an all-out assault. It lasted about a month.

Given his libertine nature, Verlaine was ecstatic in those first heady days of the revolution, that is, until two toughs in red scarves commandeered him to man, or stand upon, these treacherous piles of cobbles that had been ripped up from the street. On the rue du Chemin Vert, poor Verlaine was deployed one night—driven at the point of a spike bayonet, actually—into the thick smoke and rifle flashes where the Communards were now fighting the first elements of the French army.

In Verlaine’s hands was a broom handle that he had been told to brandish like a rifle in the darkness—a scarecrow, in effect. Another of his confrères, fortunately drunker than he, had been given a flag to wave triumphantly while another—slightly more convincing in the role—had a broken sword to hurl skyward, crying,
En avant … allez, allez!
, etc., etc.

Poor Verlaine. Trembling like a dog before a thunderstorm, he had no shame, none, as he stumbled up to the breech at the head of this gang of lollygaggers and yellow bellies. His knees buckled and quaked; at every shot he jumped. It was hopeless, hopeless. They stood him up. He sat down,
ker-thump
, with that sudden surprise of a baby. Then, amazing thing. Not two meters away, without a sound, a man collapsed.
Quite fell out of his top hat, like a marionette cut from his strings. That did it.

“I’m a
poet
,” cried Verlaine, now on all fours. “Don’t you understand, a poet!”

Ah, the adhesiveness of these sniveling cowards! Like ticks! Like leeches! The poet was a fetal ball even as the commander, a butcher, whacked him hard about the breeches with the broad of his sword—to no avail.

The terror of that one night—this was more than enough for the salon revolutionary. And so, to the Communards, he pled work, just as he told his employer, with great brio, that duty called, that he had to man the barricades. When this knavery was discovered—and all too readily, as he should have known—he was jailed for some days, leaving his pregnant wife and her parents to scrape for such siege viands as were then available: stinking horsemeat, jugged cat, leg of dog.

For Mme. Mauté, however, the final straw was when Verlaine sent his pregnant wife out to scavenge food with her father—out into the red sky of the burning city, past looters and corpses.

“I would go,” he protested. “Of course, I would. But do you want me sent to the barricades to be shot—an expectant father? You at least have a
chance
. I, if I go, I have
no
chance. None.”

“You!”
sneered Mme. Mauté when two hours had passed without their return. “Sending a pregnant girl and an old man out to find
your
food! Are you a man or a worm?”

“Oh, very well!” he said, for the maids had fled. “If you will kindly calm down, Maman, I shall uncork the wine and even set the table.”

29
The Wee Ones

Perhaps it was the insurrection, the civil chaos, the jangled nerves that set loose the gremlins of drink and disorder, for shortly after order was restored, when Verlaine returned to his office post copying documents,
he was sacked—sacked as he had hoped, actually, having gone missing for more than a week. Not to mention the many afternoons when, after his
déjeuner
, he had returned to work stiff and surly—drunk.

Never fear. As usual, Verlaine’s mother, queen of coddlers and doyenne of denial, came to the rescue of her only living child—not counting, of course, the three children that sat in jars upon the mantel. Here, perhaps, a brief explanation is in order.

The three souls in question were Paul’s two moon-headed elder brothers, Pierre and Bertrand, and his sea-horse-sized sister, Edith. Siblings, from some four to ten centimeters high, the three could be seen bobbing in a yellowy liquid of a hue somewhere between pond and pilsner. Grain alcohol, actually.

But alive
. If God was alive in the bread and wine of the Holy Sacrifice, then why, thought Verlaine’s mother, why not these three whom He had abandoned in their prime at twelve and fourteen weeks? Almost eleven, in the case of Edith, the youngest, and—as Paul had always suspected—her mother’s favorite. The tiny trio even had a name: the Wee Ones.

He remembered once picking one up—Edith. How the jar glowed in the light. Motes of sediment swirled up from the bottom, a phantasmagoria of family history. Slowly, tiny Edith floated, bumped. Froglike fingers. Sealed-over eyes, preserved for all eternity in the ultimate elixir and fixatif—alcohol. So, in the 1850s, every night before bed, we would find young Paul Verlaine on his knees, praying with his mother at the family shrine.

Staring at the stain, the pain. And he, young Paul, so
lucky
said his mother, a
survivor
. Or rather, since the Wee Ones were not “dead,” young Paul was a young redeemer; he was extraordinary in every way, going to school, even eating his dinner. Why, even tying his shoelaces—an exemplary boy.

Even his breathtaking unsightliness (cruel, since his parents were both quite handsome people), this too made him singular, if not an apology from God. Hence his mother’s obsession with him. Licking her thumb. Plastering down the errant curl. Grooming her kitten. This level
of scrutiny, already high, became well nigh unbearable once her husband, captain in the engineers, died of pneumonia, at which point, aged thirty-seven, Mme. Verlaine became a professional widow, well fixed financially and—of course with maids to do everything—now free to focus in ever more minute detail upon Paul and his three siblings.

“Mother,” said the boy in irritation, “why are you always
staring
at me?”

“But, my darling, can’t the cat look at the king?”

“Stop staring!”

“But I’m not staring,
mon petit
. Only admiring.”

She trimmed the fat from his roast beef. Then, overidolatrous, she would snitch little pieces
—his
. Anything from his plate—or life, for that matter. His dried umbilical knot. His baby teeth that she kept like small pearls of barley in a small silken purse. Or, while her little Samson slumbered, snip a lock of hair. Until,
what
?

Boy rut.

Starting at age ten, young Paul would be caught, yet again, with his hands under the supper table, feet wrapped around the legs of his chair,
erch erch erch
.

“
Ça suffit!
Hands on the table.”

“I was merely brushing the crumbs off my lap.”

“Sur la table.”

Too true. By the age of ten Mme. Verlaine’s darling had developed what then was known as
the habit
, believed to be an indication of—if not the path to
—man love
, a crime so black and foul, so unspeakable and then so unknown, that the world had yet to create a suitable name for it.

Itching himself
, such that the maid found upon his napkin egregious stains not those of the cook’s béarnaise.

Or at Mass, leg jiggling as he gazed heavenward in unsavory rapture.

Or whisking into the W.C.—in, then out—wiping his hands under his armpits. Six and eight times per day. To the point Mme. Verlaine feared physical injury, even seizure.

Then, by age fourteen, young Paul developed a comparable habit—he began to write. How lucky were his siblings, Mme. Verlaine sometimes
thought, tiny beings floating, completely contained, preserved for all eternity against injury or evil.

Bonsoir, Pierre. Bonsoir, Bertrand. Bonsoir, Edith, ma petite
.

T
his, then, is the family backdrop to the now adult Verlaine, ousted from his place of marginal employ.

Never mind that he had no conceivable grounds upon which to protest his sacking. Mother’s boy that he was, where else could he turn but to his maman? Whose great gift was the ability, where her son was concerned, to rationalize and explain away virtually anything. Even her son’s drunken 2:00 a.m. invasions, shouting and spraying spittle, roughly shaking her by the hair. One of his hallucinogenic absinthe rages.

“
Emmerdeuse! Salope. Où est l’argent? Bon Dieu!
Fucking bitch! I’ll have my inheritance or you’ll taste my fist!”

It was, of course, entirely predictable that Verlaine would be pounding on her door the night he got the sack. Why, living as he was in an age in which there was virtually no throttle on men, it was almost natural to throttle women. Witness the great philosopher Schopenhauer, who threw his landlady, come to collect the back rent, down a long flight of stairs.
Rent!
Great truths beckoned. The great man was at work, and the ignorant old bitch was bothering him.

At that time, in the sanctity of one’s own home, for a man to beat his wife—or old mother, for that matter—well, short of murder, there was little appetite to stop such unfortunate incidents, especially in so private and proprietary a place as France.

“Whore! Don’t lie to me! You want another one like that?”

Under the effects of the absinthe, Verlaine was pure infantile rage with a man’s arms; he was fire and wind and hurricane—ownerless as evil, unaccountable as nature. He wanted money,
needed it
, his brain
craved it
, money and liquor, much as a mauling bear craves food.

Sickening, no doubt about it. But if we peer into the depths of a
man’s soul, then we shall look hard at it, all of it. There will be no looking away.

E
qually natural, the next afternoon once he had sobered up and the gremlins had fled, there came another wild swing—from rage to remorse. Weeping at his mother’s door, then groveling at her feet, bawling and pounding the floor, loudly Mme. Verlaine’s son blamed the Green Fairy, Bitch Wormwood, Dame Absinthe.

“I’m
hideous
! I hate myself, ha—
aaaaatte
myself and I’m
hiddd-e-ous
!”

“Paul,” she cried, “you are
not
hideous. You drink too much. Impulsive,
quelquefois stupide
. Well, sometimes,” she added quickly, almost superstitiously, lest she curse her own seed. At least he came to visit.

“How can I live like this!” he wailed, and at that moment his horror was pure, like flames engulfing his head. “I want to kill myself! Cut my own throat. God help me! Please, a bullet, I deserve it!”

“No!” she said, furious at this blasphemy. “Never! I forgive you! Of course, I forgive you, and now you must stop this ridiculous, this horrid talk.
Stop it!
”

Completion.

Still on his knees by her chair, her torturer was blubbering in her warm lap as she rubbed his hair, a woman now in ecstasy, as soul-bruised as she was heart-fulfilled. Grief and guilt, mother and son, rocking in that after-assault, almost postcoital, sense of completion. When—

“Mother, please,” he said, lifting his head, as a seasick man might from the pitching rail of a ship. “Mother, you’re so convincing. Oh, how can I dare ask this of you …”

“What?”
she said, now very excited. “What is it you need from your maman, what? Tell me.”

“Could you—would you please speak on my behalf to my boss, Monsieur Michaud? Oh, would you, Mother?
I need my job.
”

Talk to his boss! True, around her throat Mme. Verlaine was wearing a necklace of fingerprints, but this was now far in the past—
her boy
needed her
. And, whatever else, it was a brilliant stroke on Verlaine’s part, for once away from her little brood, Mme. Verlaine was a badger, cunning and relentless. Especially when it concerned her son’s fortunes.

Nor would it be a single, forlorn appeal—no, no, this would be a full-fledged
campaign
. The next day, as a knight might pull on a mailed fist, Mme. Verlaine pulled on her long blue opera gloves; she donned her furs and her fur muffler, topped off by her opera hat with the alarming
V
of pheasant quills that made the object of her opprobrium feel like a bull’s-eye in a gun sight. Then, for added power, she took up her black lorgnette, two beetling lenses on a conductor’s baton, ideal either to wave around theatrically or train on the popinjay who had aroused her displeasure.