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Authors: Bruce Duffy
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Never! Being a wild child, an immortal, he was more than ready to die for the cause. Which, being a kid, was to
revolutionize love and transform life
. In this great cause, he was elliptical and irrational. Dissonant. Obscurantic. Crazy. Throw in scatological, too. And so he was alone. Out of his mind
with
his mind. The Pied Piper had outrun even the rats.
Still more unsettling, the lad was a peasant savant, a hick, why, a
Belgian
, almost. Indeed, as Baudelaire had warned, “The over-egoed and over-arted Belgians are so civilized / They are sometimes syphilised.”
And, worse, born to this bullheaded plough woman of no particular education. Odder still, there was the case of Arthur’s brother, Frédéric, a virtual twin. Who, until almost the age of sixteen, the mother had dressed like a doll, just as she had Arthur—her two doily boys. Indeed the next year, when the Hedgehog and Otter begged to examine poor Frédéric’s noggin, the mother summarily dismissed the idea—as preposterous, ridiculous.
“That one?” she said of her second son. “Don’t waste your time. There is a muck fork in that boy’s future.”
O ur Arthur, then, was not only a bona fide miracle but
her
miracle, about whom she was—early on, at least—extraordinarily, if secretly, vain: that this boy of hers could be so brilliant; that of nothing she could produce something—amazing, even if it was of the testicular male subspecies. Pride, then. This was Mme. Rimbaud’s sin of choice. And as a realist, she recognized it and suffered terribly because of it, and then in a way our age will never comprehend.
Pride was her weakness. And pride was precisely what she prayed against and confessed to, even as she hotly blew on it like a coal, into full and dangerous effulgence. Others knew of her outsized pride. Around Charleville her pride was legendary, second only to her ability to sense, and pounce upon, distress.
When trouble made its rounds, over the hill the unfortunate soon would see Mme. Rimbaud’s black buggy. Before the gendarme and
le croque-mort
—the undertaker—before even the worm, she was the early bird.
A woman had to be alert, she said. To drunks being carted home. To public notices. To gendarmes at the door, to distressed crops, women weeping at the pawnshop, and the like. Obviously, unlike the males, she couldn’t get her news at the various “troughs,” the tavern and cafés.
And make no mistake: in her way, Mme. Rimbaud could be charming when she wanted to. Very, when money was involved, and especially with the desperate or blithely unsuspecting. The Rimbaud children would hear, “The Rivières are having trouble.” Or still more vaguely, “There is trouble up the road—don’t speak of it.” Crossing herself. Actually shivering, lest she contract the human disease she most dreaded—failure.
And yet: she was a midwife of failure, Mme. Rimbaud. Made house calls, too. At the first whiff of bad news, she would tie her black bonnet into a big bow, then climb into her black gig. Spokes spinning, away shewent, first to the
boulangerie
to pick up the
pain de campagne
—that resilient country loaf nested so fetchingly in a napkined basket in which the unsuspecting would find a pot of fresh butter and her pungent black cherry jam.
Odd thing, though. Cut loose from her children, Mme. Rimbaud was a woman set free on these strange excursions. Indeed, when the prize presented itself, she could be playful, shameless, even getting down on her knees to hypnotize a rooster.
Hush, children
. Cluck-clucking, she flattens old Red in the dirt, sweetly jibbering the chickenish of sexy hen talk. Now observe: again and again she draws, before Red’s crossed eyes, a line in the dirt. Line after line after line, until even her young audience grows sleepy. When—
“Voilà!”
Red rises, his comb a spastic asterisk. Sputters, crows, flaps, and quakes—this as his harem, pantaloons bouncing, dives
Never! Being a wild child, an immortal, he was more than ready to die for the cause. Which, being a kid, was to
revolutionize love and transform life
. In this great cause, he was elliptical and irrational. Dissonant. Obscurantic. Crazy. Throw in scatological, too. And so he was alone. Out of his mind
with
his mind. The Pied Piper had outrun even the rats.
Still more unsettling, the lad was a peasant savant, a hick, why, a
Belgian
, almost. Indeed, as Baudelaire had warned, “The over-egoed and over-arted Belgians are so civilized / They are sometimes syphilised.”
And, worse, born to this bullheaded plough woman of no particular education. Odder still, there was the case of Arthur’s brother, Frédéric, a virtual twin. Who, until almost the age of sixteen, the mother had dressed like a doll, just as she had Arthur—her two doily boys. Indeed the next year, when the Hedgehog and Otter begged to examine poor Frédéric’s noggin, the mother summarily dismissed the idea—as preposterous, ridiculous.
“That one?” she said of her second son. “Don’t waste your time. There is a muck fork in that boy’s future.”
O ur Arthur, then, was not only a bona fide miracle but
her
miracle, about whom she was—early on, at least—extraordinarily, if secretly, vain: that this boy of hers could be so brilliant; that of nothing she could produce something—amazing, even if it was of the testicular male subspecies. Pride, then. This was Mme. Rimbaud’s sin of choice. And as a realist, she recognized it and suffered terribly because of it, and then in a way our age will never comprehend.
Pride was her weakness. And pride was precisely what she prayed against and confessed to, even as she hotly blew on it like a coal, into full and dangerous effulgence. Others knew of her outsized pride. Around Charleville her pride was legendary, second only to her ability to sense, and pounce upon, distress.
When trouble made its rounds, over the hill the unfortunate soon would see Mme. Rimbaud’s black buggy. Before the gendarme and
le croque-mort
—the undertaker—before even the worm, she was the early bird.
A woman had to be alert, she said. To drunks being carted home. To public notices. To gendarmes at the door, to distressed crops, women weeping at the pawnshop, and the like. Obviously, unlike the males, she couldn’t get her news at the various “troughs,” the tavern and cafés.
And make no mistake: in her way, Mme. Rimbaud could be charming when she wanted to. Very, when money was involved, and especially with the desperate or blithely unsuspecting. The Rimbaud children would hear, “The Rivières are having trouble.” Or still more vaguely, “There is trouble up the road—don’t speak of it.” Crossing herself. Actually shivering, lest she contract the human disease she most dreaded—failure.
And yet: she was a midwife of failure, Mme. Rimbaud. Made house calls, too. At the first whiff of bad news, she would tie her black bonnet into a big bow, then climb into her black gig. Spokes spinning, away shewent, first to the
boulangerie
to pick up the
pain de campagne
—that resilient country loaf nested so fetchingly in a napkined basket in which the unsuspecting would find a pot of fresh butter and her pungent black cherry jam.
Odd thing, though. Cut loose from her children, Mme. Rimbaud was a woman set free on these strange excursions. Indeed, when the prize presented itself, she could be playful, shameless, even getting down on her knees to hypnotize a rooster.
Hush, children
. Cluck-clucking, she flattens old Red in the dirt, sweetly jibbering the chickenish of sexy hen talk. Now observe: again and again she draws, before Red’s crossed eyes, a line in the dirt. Line after line after line, until even her young audience grows sleepy. When—
“Voilà!”
Red rises, his comb a spastic asterisk. Sputters, crows, flaps, and quakes—this as his harem, pantaloons bouncing, dives
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