The Shot in Brussels

On July 10, 1873, in a shabby hotel room in Brussels, Paul Verlaine aimed a revolver at Arthur Rimbaud. At twenty-nine, Verlaine had abandoned everything—his wife, his child, his bourgeois respectability—for this seventeen-year-old boy genius who had erupted into his life like a force of nature. Now, drunk on absinthe and despair, watching Rimbaud pack to leave him yet again, Verlaine felt his world collapsing.

"You're not leaving!" he shouted, waving the pistol he had bought that morning. "I'll kill you! I'll kill myself!"

Rimbaud, with the cold disdain that could drive Verlaine mad, continued folding his clothes. "Do what you want. You're pathetic."

The gun went off—once, twice. The first bullet struck Rimbaud's left wrist. The second embedded itself in the floor. As Rimbaud clutched his bleeding hand, Verlaine fell to his knees, sobbing, kissing the wound he had inflicted, begging forgiveness. Within hours, he would be arrested. Within days, he would be sentenced to two years in prison. The greatest love affair in French literature had ended in farce and blood.

But in his prison cell at Mons, something unexpected happened. Deprived of absinthe and Rimbaud, Verlaine rediscovered two things he had lost: his poetry and his faith. The man who had written exquisite verses about autumn melancholy and lunar landscapes began composing something entirely new—poems of religious conversion that retained all his musical genius while achieving unprecedented spiritual depth. Prison, which should have destroyed him, became his salvation.

Years later, when admirers crowned him "Prince of Poets," when young symbolists hung on his every slurred word in the cafés of the Latin Quarter, Verlaine would look back on that moment in Brussels with a mixture of horror and gratitude. He had shot at Rimbaud but hit himself, wounding the bourgeois Paul Verlaine fatally so that Pauvre Lélian (his anagrammatic alter ego) could be born. The bullet that missed its mark had somehow found its true target: the conventional man who had to die for the pure poet to live.