Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  “And he is days late,” protested Mme. Mauté, who, like her husband, now knew a little something about idler artistes and their shenanigans. “Your young friend from the village”—hayseed, she means—“he cannot wire you of his plans?”

  “This happens,” replied Verlaine carefully, if dismissively, as he stirred the cup of tea the maid had just now handed him. This, to be clear, was not the frowsy Brahmin bard-bum of 1891, dividing his time between the brothels, absinthe dens, and the various charity hospitals. No, this was the slender, young, socially ambitious, exceedingly bourgeois, and—when sober—nimbly charming Verlaine of 1871. And, thanks to his wife, who picked the fabrics and hired the tailor, the sartorially correct and even dapper Verlaine in his stovepipe trousers, proper frock coat, and earnest tie. The face, it is true, remained problematic. Pug ugly, to be frank, the moonlike forehead, pasty white skin and patchy red beard like some hirsute form of creeper. And, as if God hadn’t already singled him out, the batlike snout with a habit of cultivating alarming red carbuncles.

  Remarkably, though, Mathilde insisted she no longer noticed this unfortunate aspect of her husband. Indeed, she even saw some advantage in it. This, as she privately admitted to her mother (and with the greatest unease, lest her mother think her vain), was her considered belief: that a man of such unfortunate looks would feel so very lucky to have a woman such as herself—and so sure that he would never again enjoy such good fortune—that he would never stray. An interesting theory, to say the least.

  Attentively, Mathilde’s husband (for she now saw him as hers) stirred his tea in slow curlicues, with a fluid, faraway air perfected in the finest literary salons of Paris, a sure sign that he was either bored or irritated or both. For sure enough, much as a sedentary cat will switch its tail when ready to swat, an irritability had swept over him … impudent old trollop, sitting on her pile of money and simple self-regard! Coldly, Verlaine regarded his mother-in-law:

  “Well, Mother”—here he paused to indicate his weariness with her tedious inquiries—“he is a poet, not a rail conductor on some schedule.”

  “Ah,” said Mme. Mauté overpleasantly as she returned the favor, “then is he, too, unemployed?”

  “Maman!” protested Mathilde. “Paul, stay here, please—sit.”

  But, eyes burning, her sensitive husband was already up. “If you will excuse me—Mother.”

  “But of course I shall excuse you,” purred the queen cat. “Just as people all your life have indulged and excused you—your dear mother particularly.”

  Note his rage—his very pure rage—as he exited through the room, for he was two and he was twinned, two poles always divided and always at disequilibrium. But when Verlaine was angry—and worse, when he was both angry and drunk—these two sides of him would converge, and hard, like the blade of an axe.

  But how could Verlaine’s relations with his in-laws have come to such an unfortunate impasse, and so rapidly? And how when, during Mathilde and his courtship and leading up to their marriage, he had written poems so high-flown, idealized, and chivalrous that at times they verged on the ridiculous, seducing him himself even as he seduced Mathilde—a girl so naïve that, for some time, she believed the ardor of his kiss might impregnate her!

  Nor was Verlaine a fool. By then he knew too well that he needed the chastity belt of marriage to protect himself against his various … inclinations. Strange, indeed, how even a dog of a man, in a dog-whistle way, will suddenly feel his ears prick up and think, Marry. Absent yourself from the green bitch Absinthe—abstain. Whore no more. Give up, as if for some interminable Lent, the knee trembler with a sailor or some blacksmith’s apprentice with pythonlike biceps, before whom Verlaine would kneel in Holy Communion, his agile wrist whisk-whisking the young man, bringing him fully engorged, into his grateful mouth. Good God, he thought in that too brief moment of post-suck tristesse. You’re a poet and a husband. Have some dignity. Finis!

  He had, after all, a budding poetic reputation. Why, as a Parnassian, he swam with a school known for classic order, for flawless craft and carefully balanced emotions—embody that aesthetic. He was invited, increasingly, to the best salons—stay sober, keep it up. He was a superb technician, and it was the springtime of bourgeoisiedom—let them experience Art. For example:

  Home

  Home; the snug glow of lamps;

  Daydreams; a finger on the temple;

  Eyes lost in loved ones’ eyes

  The hour of fresh-made tea; of closed books;

  Sweet sensation of summer ending …

  Then there was Verlaine’s prospective father-in-law. Although not conspicuously wealthy or influential or aristocratic in the grand sense, M. Mauté de Fleurville was, notwithstanding, a noble gentleman of comfortably independent means who naturally adored, and also greatly indulged, his daughter. Nevertheless, it was only with the greatest possible reluctance—and then after months of her tears and entreaties—that he allowed her to marry this very dubious fellow whose face reminded him, he said, of a fresh truffle.

  And a man of what stripe? M. Mauté didn’t give a hang for poetry; he liked to stalk and shoot and mount on his trophy wall, with ironic expressions, tiny horned deer, roe deer, some scarcely larger than hares, of which he then had twelve—ah, yes, he liked to joke to visitors when he showed them his wall of horned gophers, “like the twelve apostles.” As for this Verlaine, true, M. Mauté’s inquiries revealed this so-called poet to be a young man of some poetic reputation and attainment. Son of a middling, now deceased army officer, he was more or less of adequate status and potential means once his mother died, but otherwise, well, really, what did this unfortunate man offer socially or professionally? Copying documents? Fetching coffee? Sorting mail? Not to mention the fact that he was almost ten years older than Mathilde.

  Indeed, it seemed to M. Mauté that M. Verlaine was taking unfair advantage, writing the dewy-eyed girl these gooey poems … these faux-gallant, vaguely obscene poems, fixating (foot man that Verlaine was) on the foot of his beloved:

  She stands bare-headed, eyes straight ahead; her dress

  Is of a length to half reveal

  Under the jealous folds a wicked foot’s

  Delightful point, emerging imperceptibly …

  Wary that Verlaine was merely an adventurer after her money, M. Mauté insisted there would be no dowry, ever. Pure bluster. Together with Verlaine’s widowed and equally overindulgent mother, the Mautés not only matched the 30,000 francs she gave the newlyweds but then set them up in a handsomely furnished apartment on the corner of the quai de la Tournelle, an address where, from the balcony, in one sweep, the lovebirds could take in the Seine and Notre Dame and Montmartre in the distance. Here, too, Verlaine had his own study with a fine view, a padded leather chair, and a sturdy desk that his adoring wife (as if leaving straw and water for an animal in captivity) had provisioned with ink, paper, expensive pens, and tobacco. Voilà … create.

  So great was their passion and optimism that they married just a week after the Germans invaded in the summer of 1870—indeed, even as the Huns were trampling Mme. Rimbaud’s rye and her youngest son was plotting his escape.

  In Paris, however, it was not seen as a war per se. It was, rather, a summer’s escapade. No one dreamed that in a mere two months the French army would collapse, that Napoleon III would be dethroned, and that Paris—always on the verge in those years—would tumble into civil chaos. But so it did unravel after Napoleon III, the aggressor, met his final humiliating rout in Sedan, on the Belgian border. When the Huns tried their triumphal march into Paris, armed mobs, outraged at their feckless government, resisted, then rose in armed rebellion against both the Germans and the government. It was a revolt of the workers and the poor—the Communards—indeed the first revolution ever to take up the red banners of socialism. Within days, enormous barricades of paving stones, timbers, rubble, and bricks blocked the streets. Already well armed with rifles and ammunition, the home guard seized the city’s canno
ns, even as the Germans blocked food and fuel shipments and the dithering French government plotted an all-out assault. It lasted about a month.

  Given his libertine nature, Verlaine was ecstatic in those first heady days of the revolution, that is, until two toughs in red scarves commandeered him to man, or stand upon, these treacherous piles of cobbles that had been ripped up from the street. On the rue du Chemin Vert, poor Verlaine was deployed one night—driven at the point of a spike bayonet, actually—into the thick smoke and rifle flashes where the Communards were now fighting the first elements of the French army.

  In Verlaine’s hands was a broom handle that he had been told to brandish like a rifle in the darkness—a scarecrow, in effect. Another of his confrères, fortunately drunker than he, had been given a flag to wave triumphantly while another—slightly more convincing in the role—had a broken sword to hurl skyward, crying, En avant … allez, allez!, etc., etc.

  Poor Verlaine. Trembling like a dog before a thunderstorm, he had no shame, none, as he stumbled up to the breech at the head of this gang of lollygaggers and yellow bellies. His knees buckled and quaked; at every shot he jumped. It was hopeless, hopeless. They stood him up. He sat down, ker-thump, with that sudden surprise of a baby. Then, amazing thing. Not two meters away, without a sound, a man collapsed. Quite fell out of his top hat, like a marionette cut from his strings. That did it.

  “I’m a poet,” cried Verlaine, now on all fours. “Don’t you understand, a poet!”

  Ah, the adhesiveness of these sniveling cowards! Like ticks! Like leeches! The poet was a fetal ball even as the commander, a butcher, whacked him hard about the breeches with the broad of his sword—to no avail.

  The terror of that one night—this was more than enough for the salon revolutionary. And so, to the Communards, he pled work, just as he told his employer, with great brio, that duty called, that he had to man the barricades. When this knavery was discovered—and all too readily, as he should have known—he was jailed for some days, leaving his pregnant wife and her parents to scrape for such siege viands as were then available: stinking horsemeat, jugged cat, leg of dog.

  For Mme. Mauté, however, the final straw was when Verlaine sent his pregnant wife out to scavenge food with her father—out into the red sky of the burning city, past looters and corpses.

  “I would go,” he protested. “Of course, I would. But do you want me sent to the barricades to be shot—an expectant father? You at least have a chance. I, if I go, I have no chance. None.”

  “You!” sneered Mme. Mauté when two hours had passed without their return. “Sending a pregnant girl and an old man out to find your food! Are you a man or a worm?”

  “Oh, very well!” he said, for the maids had fled. “If you will kindly calm down, Maman, I shall uncork the wine and even set the table.”

  29 The Wee Ones

  Perhaps it was the insurrection, the civil chaos, the jangled nerves that set loose the gremlins of drink and disorder, for shortly after order was restored, when Verlaine returned to his office post copying documents, he was sacked—sacked as he had hoped, actually, having gone missing for more than a week. Not to mention the many afternoons when, after his déjeuner, he had returned to work stiff and surly—drunk.

  Never fear. As usual, Verlaine’s mother, queen of coddlers and doyenne of denial, came to the rescue of her only living child—not counting, of course, the three children that sat in jars upon the mantel. Here, perhaps, a brief explanation is in order.

  The three souls in question were Paul’s two moon-headed elder brothers, Pierre and Bertrand, and his sea-horse-sized sister, Edith. Siblings, from some four to ten centimeters high, the three could be seen bobbing in a yellowy liquid of a hue somewhere between pond and pilsner. Grain alcohol, actually.

  But alive. If God was alive in the bread and wine of the Holy Sacrifice, then why, thought Verlaine’s mother, why not these three whom He had abandoned in their prime at twelve and fourteen weeks? Almost eleven, in the case of Edith, the youngest, and—as Paul had always suspected—her mother’s favorite. The tiny trio even had a name: the Wee Ones.

  He remembered once picking one up—Edith. How the jar glowed in the light. Motes of sediment swirled up from the bottom, a phantasmagoria of family history. Slowly, tiny Edith floated, bumped. Froglike fingers. Sealed-over eyes, preserved for all eternity in the ultimate elixir and fixatif—alcohol. So, in the 1850s, every night before bed, we would find young Paul Verlaine on his knees, praying with his mother at the family shrine.

  Staring at the stain, the pain. And he, young Paul, so lucky said his mother, a survivor. Or rather, since the Wee Ones were not “dead,” young Paul was a young redeemer; he was extraordinary in every way, going to school, even eating his dinner. Why, even tying his shoelaces—an exemplary boy.

  Even his breathtaking unsightliness (cruel, since his parents were both quite handsome people), this too made him singular, if not an apology from God. Hence his mother’s obsession with him. Licking her thumb. Plastering down the errant curl. Grooming her kitten. This level of scrutiny, already high, became well nigh unbearable once her husband, captain in the engineers, died of pneumonia, at which point, aged thirty-seven, Mme. Verlaine became a professional widow, well fixed financially and—of course with maids to do everything—now free to focus in ever more minute detail upon Paul and his three siblings.

  “Mother,” said the boy in irritation, “why are you always staring at me?”

  “But, my darling, can’t the cat look at the king?”

  “Stop staring!”

  “But I’m not staring, mon petit. Only admiring.”

  She trimmed the fat from his roast beef. Then, overidolatrous, she would snitch little pieces—his. Anything from his plate—or life, for that matter. His dried umbilical knot. His baby teeth that she kept like small pearls of barley in a small silken purse. Or, while her little Samson slumbered, snip a lock of hair. Until, what?

  Boy rut.

  Starting at age ten, young Paul would be caught, yet again, with his hands under the supper table, feet wrapped around the legs of his chair, erch erch erch.

  “Ça suffit! Hands on the table.”

  “I was merely brushing the crumbs off my lap.”

  “Sur la table.”

  Too true. By the age of ten Mme. Verlaine’s darling had developed what then was known as the habit, believed to be an indication of—if not the path to—man love, a crime so black and foul, so unspeakable and then so unknown, that the world had yet to create a suitable name for it.

  Itching himself, such that the maid found upon his napkin egregious stains not those of the cook’s béarnaise.

  Or at Mass, leg jiggling as he gazed heavenward in unsavory rapture.

  Or whisking into the W.C.—in, then out—wiping his hands under his armpits. Six and eight times per day. To the point Mme. Verlaine feared physical injury, even seizure.

  Then, by age fourteen, young Paul developed a comparable habit—he began to write. How lucky were his siblings, Mme. Verlaine sometimes thought, tiny beings floating, completely contained, preserved for all eternity against injury or evil.

  Bonsoir, Pierre. Bonsoir, Bertrand. Bonsoir, Edith, ma petite.

  This, then, is the family backdrop to the now adult Verlaine, ousted from his place of marginal employ.

  Never mind that he had no conceivable grounds upon which to protest his sacking. Mother’s boy that he was, where else could he turn but to his maman? Whose great gift was the ability, where her son was concerned, to rationalize and explain away virtually anything. Even her son’s drunken 2:00 a.m. invasions, shouting and spraying spittle, roughly shaking her by the hair. One of his hallucinogenic absinthe rages.

  “Emmerdeuse! Salope. Où est l’argent? Bon Dieu! Fucking bitch! I’ll have my inheritance or you’ll taste my fist!”

  It was, of course, entirely predictable that Verlaine would be pounding on her door the night he got the sack. Why, living as he was in an age in which there
was virtually no throttle on men, it was almost natural to throttle women. Witness the great philosopher Schopenhauer, who threw his landlady, come to collect the back rent, down a long flight of stairs. Rent! Great truths beckoned. The great man was at work, and the ignorant old bitch was bothering him.

  At that time, in the sanctity of one’s own home, for a man to beat his wife—or old mother, for that matter—well, short of murder, there was little appetite to stop such unfortunate incidents, especially in so private and proprietary a place as France.

  “Whore! Don’t lie to me! You want another one like that?”

  Under the effects of the absinthe, Verlaine was pure infantile rage with a man’s arms; he was fire and wind and hurricane—ownerless as evil, unaccountable as nature. He wanted money, needed it, his brain craved it, money and liquor, much as a mauling bear craves food.

  Sickening, no doubt about it. But if we peer into the depths of a man’s soul, then we shall look hard at it, all of it. There will be no looking away.

  Equally natural, the next afternoon once he had sobered up and the gremlins had fled, there came another wild swing—from rage to remorse. Weeping at his mother’s door, then groveling at her feet, bawling and pounding the floor, loudly Mme. Verlaine’s son blamed the Green Fairy, Bitch Wormwood, Dame Absinthe.

  “I’m hideous! I hate myself, ha—aaaaatte myself and I’m hiddd-e-ous!”

  “Paul,” she cried, “you are not hideous. You drink too much. Impulsive, quelquefois stupide. Well, sometimes,” she added quickly, almost superstitiously, lest she curse her own seed. At least he came to visit.

  “How can I live like this!” he wailed, and at that moment his horror was pure, like flames engulfing his head. “I want to kill myself! Cut my own throat. God help me! Please, a bullet, I deserve it!”