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After Verlaine in a drunken fit tried to strangle his wife, hurled his infant son against a wall, the poets migrated to London. But derangement of all the senses began to bore even Rimbaud. The Infernal Husband, as Rimbaud later styled himself, took to brutalizing the Foolish Virgin, as he called Verlaine. Even in Paris, Rimbaud had once told his friend to place his hands on the table, then slashed them with a knife. "Verlaine," says Author Starkie with typical restraint, "immediately got up and left the café." In London, Verlaine could stand such unkindnesses no longer: he ran away. Although Rimbaud overtook him as the Ostend boat was about to sail, Verlaine just shook his head: he would not get off. Hysterical. Rimbaud wrote Verlaine imploring him to come back, threatened in a postscript: "If I cannot see you again I shall enlist in the army or the navy."
In Brussels, when Rimbaud caught up, Verlaine shot him in the wrist. When he tried another shooting the next day, Rimbaud ran for a policeman. Verlaine was arrested and sentenced to two years' hard labor. Rimbaud hurried home, wrote Une Saison en Enfer.
For the next six years Rimbaud wandered back & forth across Europe. In Marseille he worked as a stevedore. In Vienna he begged in the streets. He enlisted in the Dutch army, was sent to Java, where he deserted three weeks later, disappeared in the jungle, reappeared in Liverpool. To catch a ship for Egypt he crossed the Alps on foot in winter. "No precipices were now visible, no mountains, nothing but the blinding whiteness. . . ." His face was masked in icicles, but he reached Genoa alive. In Suez he gathered loot pirated from wrecked ships. In Cyprus he was foreman of a labor gang. All this before he was 25.
A French coffee exporter gave Rimbaud a job at his store in Aden, "that horrible rock." Rimbaud began to pinch pennies like his mother. With small capital he started running guns to Ethiopia, slaves to Arabia. His little house, the site of which Evelyn Waugh found a few years ago at Harar, was a gathering place for French traders, Italian explorers. Rimbaud's bluntness and sincerity, outrageous to Europeans, charmed the Ethiopians, won him the confidence of Emperor Menelek's nephew.
But Rimbaud had contracted syphilis: his right leg began to swell until he was unable to use it. He returned to France to die in agony.
*Of whom Anthony Eden is one.