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The New French. The implication was clear. Two years later, ostensibly charged with wounding Rimbaud with a pistol during a quarrel, but in effect charged with homosexuality, Verlaine was sentenced to two years' imprisonment at hard labor. Later a Paris court awarded Mathilde a separation decree. These catastrophes, in the opinion of British Biographers Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson, proved the making of Verlaine. Stripped of both wife and friend, he went straight to the prison chaplain, asked to be received back into the church. He "happily began to write religious poems" and, on his release from prison, lived for years without love or liquor. He explained: "I'm fighting to put down that old Me."
Most of Verlaine's greatest poems (La Bonne Chanson, Sagesse, Romances sans paroles) express a medley of sensuality, longing and faith. Verlaine learned a "new" French—strong, vigorous and plain. He and Rimbaud broke down "the barrier between poet and reader by using French as it was then spoken"—not as courtiers of the past had spoken it. They changed the monotonous, end-of-line rhyme, throwing the stress not where elegance demanded it, but "where the sense lay." Where Verlaine used the old end rhyme, he made it run rather than halt—and how hauntingly and simply he did it is seen in the opening stanza of one of his loveliest poems, evoking an autumnal mood to the sobs of violins:
Les sanglots longs Des violons
De I'automne Blessent man coeur D'une langueur Monotone.
Lord of the Wards. Verlaine did not stick to his reformed way of life. Absinthe and syphilis drove him into a public hospital, where he "was looked after like a child [and] had absolutely no responsibility." This being the condition he had always sought, Verlaine developed a passion for hospitals. Propped up on pillows, he "wrote his way through reams of hospital paper, pouring out poems, prose [and] presided in state over all the affairs of the ward." Young poets and admirers came daily to his bedside, listened rapturously while the Master, his hospital nightcap jauntily askew, recited his poems aloud. Then they tiptoed out, after "carefully depositing under the inverted chamber pot a bottle of brandy, or a flask of absinthe, some cigars or tobacco."
All good things come to an end. Eventually Verlaine could no longer afford the luxury of a public hospital; his poems were making too much money. Yet the journalists who flocked to interview him found him indescribably shabby. Where was the money going? It was a long time before they discovered that the "Prince of Poets" was supporting three retired prostitutes named Philomene, Eugenie and Caroline, and living with each in turn. No scandal could shake the dignity of the great man, who now referred to himself in the third person, saying: "He has little left to him except his poverty, but he insists that this at least shall be respected." It was. When he stumbled home drunk, a proud gendarme escorted him, explaining to passersby: "Monsieur Verlaine has to be in that condition to write."