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The Hanson husband-and-wife team has long specialized in biographies of 19th century artists, including Van Gogh, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. Their principal weakness has always been to pull out the stops too much and overdramatize the tragic element. The present work is their best book because Verlaine was not only, as he said, "I'Empire a la fin de la decadence" (the Empire in the last stages of its decline), but also a man who tempered every tragedy with a humor ranging from the ironical to the hilarious. His funeral (he was 51 when he died) was one of the best farces ever staged. Fellow Poet Catulle Menèes carried one cord of the pall with one hand, dexterously skimmed through a newspaper with the other. Seven literary men delivered seven magnificent orations. Philomene and Eugenie were both present, bathed in tears. Only Caroline was unavoidably detained. She was stark naked in front of Verlaine's house in the Rue Descartes, shrieking that she was his muse.