different guises, poisoning his old affections. Even nature, that nature he had so loved, to which he had given himself and all his, he now saw to be no more than a "display of liberality." Wherever he projected his thought the spirit faced him; he became convinced that there was nothing outside the spirit. Art too was a display of liberality, a mocking present to him from the powers. His antics had served only to amuse the spirit. Ironically he pretended to find comfort in what he had done for others. "Bah! Faisons toutes les grimaces imaginables!"
In this mood his relations with Verlaine appeared to him particularly silly: himself, the amusing demon leading astray into spiritual aberration, Verlaine the foolish virgin; who had never understood the demon's aspirations, who never would understand them. In a chapter of Une Saison Rimbaud mocks Verlaine as cruelly and anxiously as though Verlaine were a part of his own nature, infinitely weak and foolish.
Yet did not Verlaine, continuing with absinthe and humility, turn out in the end the more steadfast wizard?
The future was now as much a source of trouble to Rimbaud as the past. He dared not kill himself. "Quick," he says, "are there other lives?" He considers the various conditions and professions which are open, now that his chosen profession has failed and rejects them all. "A hard life, a pure self-stultification—lift with withered fist the lid of the coffin, sit down, suffocate." But gradually the sickness is abating, life begins to appear almost possible again, and he ends his book in a curious accent of determination, and starts off again "to possess the truth in a soul and body."
What did he mean? We only know that a few months later he burned every copy of Une Saison which he could lay hands on and set off on a painful journey over the planet, which came to centre eventually in the deserts about the Rea Sea. Silent except for a few letters to his family, this period of twenty years is subject to interpretations.
The persons who have thought and written about him most since his death, M. Berrichon, M. Paul Claudel, and Isabelle Rimbaud, his sister, have considered it their duty to give him a reputation for sanctity—and in a way with reason. The legend of Rimbaud, growing like a snowball as it rolled through the Paris cafés, had become peculiarly monstrous. Even the thoughtful and perverse
