Paul Verlaine

The clerk at the Hôtel de Ville

Verlaine was born on 30 March 1844 at Metz, where his father was an army officer, and the family moved to Paris in 1851 — so he was a Paris child from the age of seven. He took his baccalauréat, the French school leaving certificate, in 1862, and at twenty went into the civil service as an expéditionnaire, a copying clerk, at the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall of Paris. It was a job for a young man with evenings free, and he spent them in the ale houses of the rue Soufflot, the short street that runs from the Luxembourg gardens up to the Panthéon — the domed monument where France buries its national figures — in the Latin Quarter, the student and publishing district on the Left Bank, among the young poets of the day.

What set him writing was Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal ("The Flowers of Evil", 1857), the book that had been prosecuted for obscenity and had made modern city life a subject for poetry. Verlaine's first collection, Poèmes saturniens ("Saturnine Poems", 1866), appeared while he was still clerking, and he published alongside the Parnassians — the group of poets who wanted verse impersonal, sculpted and exact. He was never really one of them. Fêtes galantes ("Gallant Festivities", 1869), a set of small poems about masked figures in eighteenth-century parkland, is already unmistakably his: nothing quite stated, everything shaded, the whole thing hovering.

Music before everything

Verlaine's poems ask to be heard rather than parsed. He liked lines with an odd number of syllables, which never fall into a marching rhythm; he blurred rhyme where French poetry demanded it crisp; he preferred a mood at dusk to a statement at noon. He set out the programme in "Art poétique", written in prison in the 1870s and printed in Jadis et naguère ("Long Ago and Not So Long Ago", 1884), and its opening line became the motto of the Symbolists, the generation of poets who wanted suggestion instead of description.

Music before everything else

De la musique avant toute chose

Composers took him at his word. Claude Debussy, who set him repeatedly, found in these poems the loose, floating relation between words and harmony that he was after; Gabriel Fauré and Reynaldo Hahn set him too, and the national library's own catalogue notes the settings as a defining fact of the work. It is why a reader who knows no French poetry at all has probably heard Verlaine — as the words under a mélodie, the French art song, in a concert hall.

The marriage he burned down

On 11 August 1870 Verlaine married Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville, sixteen when they met and nineteen at the wedding, and gave her La Bonne Chanson ("The Good Song"), a book of gentle poems written in the courtship. They lived in her parents' house; a son, Georges, was born in October 1871. Verlaine's drinking was already violent, and the collapse of the Paris Commune — the revolutionary city government of spring 1871, which he had served under as a press officer at the Hôtel de Ville — had left him without a job and afraid of reprisals.

Into that household, in September 1871, came a sixteen-year-old from the Ardennes whom Verlaine had invited on the strength of poems sent by post. Arthur Rimbaud was rude, unwashed and better than anyone at the table; Mathilde's parents, the Mautés, threw him out within weeks, and Verlaine took rooms for him elsewhere. By the following summer Verlaine had left his wife and infant son to travel with him. Mathilde pursued a legal separation; the divorce came through in 1885, and she published her side of it, Mémoires de ma vie ("Memories of My Life"), long after his death.

Brussels, and two years in a Belgian prison

The two poets spent about two years moving between Paris, Brussels and London, teaching a little French, quarrelling and separating and coming back. On 10 July 1873, in a Brussels hotel room, Verlaine — drunk, and certain that Rimbaud was leaving for good — bought a revolver and fired two shots, wounding him in the wrist. Rimbaud was treated at hospital and appealed to a policeman when Verlaine followed him through the street. The Belgian court sentenced Verlaine to two years; he served about eighteen months, most of it at Mons, and was released in January 1875.

Prison made him a Catholic — a genuine conversion, not a pose, and the source of the religious poems of Sagesse ("Wisdom", 1881), which many readers still think his best book. It also gave him time to write: Romances sans paroles ("Songs Without Words", 1874), the collection that came out of the wandering years with Rimbaud, was published while he was inside, and he read Shakespeare and Cervantes in his cell. He came out at thirty, sober, devout and unemployable, and went to teach English schoolboys — first in Lincolnshire, then in the Ardennes, where a pupil named Lucien Létinois became the great attachment of his middle life. Létinois died of typhoid in 1883, and Verlaine wrote the book Amour ("Love", 1888) around the loss.

The Latin Quarter's famous ruin

Back in Paris in the 1880s, broke and drinking again, Verlaine did the single most consequential thing of his later career: he wrote about other people. Les Poètes maudits ("The Accursed Poets", 1884) is a set of essays introducing poets almost nobody had read — Tristan Corbière, Stéphane Mallarmé, and above all Rimbaud, whose work Verlaine quoted at length and effectively launched. He included himself in the last chapter as "Pauvre Lélian" ("Poor Lélian"), a name whose letters are an anagram of Paul Verlaine. The book invented a category the French language still uses: the poète maudit, the doomed poet whose life wrecks itself while the work survives.

He then became one. The last decade was lived in public in the Latin Quarter: absinthe — the strong green anise spirit that was the era's cheap ruin — in the cafés of the boulevard Saint-Michel, rented rooms he could not pay for, stretches in the public hospitals (Broussais, Saint-Louis, Bichat) where he was treated for the leg ulcers, diabetes and drink, and wrote while in the ward. Two women, Philomène Boudin and Eugénie Krantz, kept and fought over him by turns. Young writers made pilgrimages to whichever café he was in, and in August 1894, after the death of the poet Leconte de Lisle, who had held the title before him, his fellow writers voted him Prince des Poètes, Prince of Poets — an honorary title, carrying no money, given to a man living on charity.

39 rue Descartes

He died on 8 January 1896 of pulmonary congestion, in a rented room at 39 rue Descartes, a steep street on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève — the hill that carries the Latin Quarter up behind the Panthéon — in the 5th arrondissement, a few minutes' walk from the ale houses of his twenties. Eugénie Krantz was with him. The Bibliothèque nationale de France records the death simply: Paris, 5e arrondissement, 8 January 1896.

The funeral, two days later, was enormous. The coffin went to the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont beside the Panthéon — Gabriel Fauré played the organ — and then across Paris to the cimetière des Batignolles, the Batignolles cemetery in the north-west of the city, followed by a crowd of writers and readers, with speeches at the grave from the poets who had made him their prince. It was the largest literary funeral Paris had seen in years, for a man who had spent the previous winter in a hospital bed and who had, by his own arithmetic, ruined nearly everything except the poems.