The Anti-Valentine’s tale of Rimbaud and Verlaine

And now for a Valentine’s tale to make singletons sleep at night, and give smug couples the fear; an absinthe-soaked love story ending in violence and attempted murder.

Down on that stretch of Royal College Street that’s not quite Camden Town, and yet isn’t King’s Cross either – past wonderful Victorian boozer the Golden Lion, and parallel to the murky Regent’s Canal – is a row of Grade II-listed houses.

True, they’re not quite as shabby as they were a decade ago, but with the roar of single-lane traffic, and the vast nearby Parcel Force building, it’s still a bleak spot, denying any kind of proximity to the mighty St Pancras development.

At No 8 is a plaque: “The French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud lived here May-July 1873”. Like many memorials, this simple line intriguingly undersells what really happened.

Rimbaud and Verlaine were two highly influential French poets. Something of an abusive drunk, Paul Verlaine was 27 when he controversially left his wife for the 17-year-old Arthur Rimbaud, after the younger man had sent him a handful of poems. The lovers fled to London after ‘scandalizing’ Paris with their wild hashish and absinthe-fuelled existence, settling on the outskirts of Camden Town. It was a time when both wrote work which was to earn them a place in world literature (Verlaine much of his Romances sans paroles, and Rimbaud, allegedly, the Illuminations, including his great prose poem Une Saison en Enfer (“A Season in Hell”).

But enough of all that! What really went on behind the closed doors of 8 Royal (then called Great) College Street? Well, the young Rimbaud, it seems, was quite a handful: at 16, he had written that “I’m now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet.”

His biographer Graham Robb notes that he “rarely washed, left turds under one friend’s pillow, and put sulphuric acid in the drink of another; not to mention that he hacked at his wrists with a penknife and stabbed him in the thigh”.

What a tyke. But the poets quickly fell for Victorian London, especially, wrote Verlaine, the fact that it was “prudish, but with every vice on offer”, and the inhabitants “permanently sozzled, despite ridiculous bills on drunkenness”. Interesting, isn’t it, that those two facts remain essentially the same nowadays, and like many visitors to the city, the boys simply jumped in.

Too much gin-and-absinthe leads to lads scrapping, of course, and the knives inevitably came out. “As soon as mutilation had been achieved,” writes Robb, “they put the knives away and went to the pub.”

Things all came to a head, however, after Verlaine returned one morning from Camden market (rather than Camden Market, of course) with a fish and a bottle of oil. A smirk from the cocky teen resulted in his older lover retaliating with a swipe across the face with the wet fish. Verlaine then stomped off to Brussels threatening suicide and, after pawning whatever clothes they had left, Rimbaud pursued him to a Brussels hotel, where they had their final row. Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the arm and was eventually jailed for two years.

That was pretty much that for the boys’ affair, but in an odd postscript, Rimbaud never wrote poetry after the age of 20, instead becoming a merchant and dying of cancer at just 37; whilst Verlaine’s alcoholism got the better of him, and he died in poverty at 51. Yet their poetry influenced the Symbolists, Dadaists, and Surrealists, as well as numerous 20th century musicians, from Jim Morrison and Patti Smith to, um, Pete Doherty.

In his 1974 song, You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (released on the album Blood on the Tracks) Bob Dylan sings: “Situations have ended sad/ Relationships have all been bad/ Mine have been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud./ But there’s no way I can compare/ All those scenes to this affair/ Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go”.

Is there a moral to all this then? Of course not. But at least the house gets a happy ending. In 2006, the dilapidated pile was put on the market by the Royal Veterinary College amidst fears that its status as literary landmark would never be recognised.

For a short while the press was awash with talk of restoring it as a museum; this never happened, although at least the elliptic plaque was installed. But nonetheless it makes an atmospheric spot on Valentine’s Day to contemplate, y’know, the transience of love. And, for that matter, life.

Article updated February 2021