Arthur Rimbaud

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891) was a French poet whose work, marked by transgressive and surreal themes, anticipated surrealism and left a lasting mark on modern literature and art. He was born in Charleville and began writing very young, proving an exceptional student, but he left school in his teens to flee to Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Almost all of his literary work came from his late adolescence and early twenties; he stopped writing entirely at age 20, after finishing his last major collection, *Illuminations*.

Rimbaud was a libertine and restless spirit, known for a turbulent, sometimes violent two-year romantic involvement with fellow poet Paul Verlaine. After giving up writing, he spent years traveling across three continents as a merchant and explorer. He died of cancer just after turning 37. As a poet, he is especially noted for his role in symbolism and for works like *A Season in Hell*, a forerunner of modernist literature.

**Life**

**Family and childhood (1854–1861)** Arthur Rimbaud was the second child born to Frédéric Rimbaud, an infantry captain from a Burgundian family with Provençal roots, and Marie Catherine Vitalie Rimbaud (née Cuif), in the provincial town of Charleville (now part of Charleville-Mézières) in northeastern France’s Ardennes department. Captain Rimbaud had risen through the ranks, served abroad extensively—including in the conquest of Algeria from 1844 to 1850—and was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1854. Described as good-natured and generous, with the long moustache and goatee of a Chasseur officer, he met Vitalie Cuif in October 1852 in Mézières. She was eleven years younger, from a solid Ardennais family with some bohemian tendencies (two of her brothers were alcoholics), and was said to be the opposite of her husband: narrow-minded, stingy, and humorless. An early biographer found her withdrawn, stubborn, and taciturn. Rimbaud privately called her “Mouth of Darkness” and “La Mother.”

They married on 8 February 1853. Their first child, Jean Nicolas Frédéric, was born nine months later on 2 November. Arthur arrived on 20 October 1854. Three more children followed: Victorine-Pauline-Vitalie (born 4 June 1857, died weeks later), Jeanne-Rosalie-Vitalie (born 15 June 1858), and Frédérique Marie Isabelle (born 1 June 1860). Though the marriage lasted seven years, Captain Rimbaud lived at home for less than three months total (February to May 1853). His military postings—including the Crimean War and the Sardinian Campaign, for which he earned medals—kept him away; he returned only on leave and was absent for his children’s births and baptisms. After Isabelle’s birth in 1860, he stopped coming home altogether. The couple never divorced but separated completely; Madame Rimbaud thereafter called herself “widow Rimbaud,” and the captain described himself as a widower. Neither he nor his children ever sought contact.

**Schooling and teen years (1861–1871)** In 1862, worried that her children were being influenced by poor neighbors, Madame Rimbaud moved the family to the Cours d’Orléans, a better area. The boys, then nine and eight, had been taught at home by their mother; now they were sent to the Pension Rossat, an old, respected school. For five years, their formidable mother continued to push them toward academic success, punishing them by making them memorize a hundred lines of Latin verse and withholding meals for mistakes. At age nine, Arthur wrote a 700-word essay objecting to learning Latin, condemning classical education as a path to a salaried job and declaring, “I will be a rentier.” He disliked schoolwork and resented his mother’s constant supervision; she walked them home from school until they were fifteen and sixteen.

As a boy, Rimbaud was small and pale with light brown hair. His lifelong best friend, Ernest Delahaye, described his eyes as “pale blue irradiated with dark blue—the loveliest eyes I’ve seen.” Like his mother, he was an ardent Catholic and had his First Communion at eleven, earning the schoolyard nickname “sale petit Cagot.” That year, he and his brother entered the Collège de Charleville. Until then, his reading had been mostly the Bible, along with fairy tales and adventure stories by James Fenimore Cooper and Gustave Aimard. At the Collège, he excelled, leading his class in all subjects except math and science; his teachers noted his ability to absorb vast amounts of material. In 1869, he won eight first prizes in French academic competitions, including Religious Education, and seven first prizes the following year.