Long-dead French poet still receives mail from fans
Print Edition
TWO or three times a week a postman shows up at a cemetery in the eastern French town of Charleville-Mezieres with a letter for a poet who continues to stir passions 127 years after his death.
Some of the missives addressed to Arthur Rimbaud contain declarations of undying love for the prodigious enfant terrible of French letters, who passed away at 37 after a rollercoaster life that included an opium-fuelled affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine as well as a stint as an arms dealer.
“Rimbaud, even if you are no longer there, know that I will love you forever,” reads one letter deposited in the postbox inscribed with the poet’s name at the graveyard’s entrance.
Another promises him “the sun, moon and stars.”
Some of those trying to commune with the dead poet seem to find solace in writing to another tortured soul, who stunned the Paris literary scene as a precocious teen attempting to chart the unconscious mind in poems.
Rummaging through a stack of shoe boxes in which he keeps the correspondence, the cemetery’s caretaker Bernard Colin pulls out a handwritten letter from a man named Philippe who is contemplating the “living shreds of my youth, the last promise of my miserable existence.”
He never fails to be moved by the emotions expressed.
“People confide in Rimbaud about their disillusionment. He is their confidant. They talk to him as if he were still alive,” the watchman said.
The steady trickle of letters and visitors testifies to the renewed interest in the poet, whose mystique was enhanced by his decision to renounce poetry in his prime for a peripatetic existence as a mercenary-turned-merchant-turned-arms-trader.
As a teen, the poet railed against the strictures of small-town life in Charleville, a town near Belgium that has long labored under a reputation for being dull, and continually plotted his escape.
Yet throughout his short life, he would invariably return home in times of crisis, such as when Verlaine pulled a gun on him during a quarrel in Brussels and shot him in the arm.
The self-styled prophet struggled to gain acceptance in his hometown, and ignored him up until the 1960s when counterculture figures such as The Doors’ Jim Morrison began acclaiming him as their idol.
Cottoning on to the tourist potential of brand Rimbaud, the town in 1969 got a Rimbaud Museum, and in 2004, on the 150th anniversary of his birth, a house where he lived was transformed into a commemorative space.
“Rimbaud is Charleville-Meziere’s Jim Morrison!” the museum’s director Lucille Pennel said, comparing the lure of the poet to that of The Doors’ frontman whose Paris grave has also become a fan shrine.
Among the devotees to have visited the grave recently are American singer-songwriter Patti Smith, who left behind a guitar plectrum, as well as French rocker Hubert-Felix Thiefaine and former prime minister Dominique de Villepin. The cemetery also receives a large number of Asian visitors keen to pay their respects.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
