page_title: Paul Verlaine
section_title: Relationships with Rimbaud and Létinois
hierarchical_section_title: Paul Verlaine / Biography / Relationships with Rimbaud and Létinois
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Portrait photographique de Paul Verlaine. [Paris, 1893]. Négatif original sur plaque de verre (11,7 x 17,8 cm), légendé au verso sur une bande de papier collé Verlaine. Photographe d'origine suédoise, Otto Wegener (1849-1922) s'installa à Paris, place de la Madeleine, en 1883. Il devint rapidement le portraitiste de la société mondaine, y compris de Marcel Proust qui l'admirait. En 1893, Otto consacra à Verlaine une séance de six poses. Revêtu d'une pelisse, il est tantôt coiffé d'un haut de forme, tantôt tête nue. (Van Bever &amp; Monda, Bibliographie et iconographie de Paul Verlaine, 1926, p. 218). Trois ans avant sa mort, le poète apparaît la face socratique, le front bossué, le regard enfoncé sous l'arcade sourcilière, arborant l'écharpe chamarrée dont il était si fier. L'un des plus célèbres portraits de Verlaine&#160;: de trois quarts, la main droite dans le gilet, le candidat à l'Académie française pose pour la postérité. La superbe écharpe brodée de chez Charvet lui avait été offerte par Robert de Montesquiou. Le dessin de l'écharpe rappelle les motifs japonisants alors en vogue. La photographie est reproduite notamment dans le numéro spécial de La Plume consacré à Verlaine en 1896. Extrait d'un catalogue de vente de Sotheby's&#160;: Arthur Rimbaud&#160;: Biographie et poésie, 2010 English: Paul Verlaine wearing a Charvet scarf: Cabinet Card Portraits in the Collection of Radical Publisher Benjamin R. Tucker Collection
context_page_description: Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement and the Decadent movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.
context_section_description: Verlaine returned to Paris in August 1871, and, in September, he received the first letter from Arthur Rimbaud, who admired his poetry. He urged Rimbaud to come to Paris, and by 1872, he had lost interest in Mathilde, and effectively abandoned her and their son, preferring the company of his new lover. Rimbaud and Verlaine's stormy affair took them to London in 1872.  In Brussels in July 1873 in a drunken, jealous rage, he fired two shots with a pistol at Rimbaud, wounding his left wrist, though not seriously injuring the poet. As an indirect result of this incident, Verlaine was arrested and imprisoned at Mons, where he underwent a re-conversion to Roman Catholicism, which again influenced his work and provoked Rimbaud's sharp criticism.
  The poems collected in Romances sans paroles (1874) were written between 1872 and 1873, inspired by Verlaine's nostalgically colored recollections of his life with Mathilde on the one hand and impressionistic sketches of his on-again off-again year-long escapade with Rimbaud on the other. Romances sans paroles was published while Verlaine was imprisoned. Following his release from prison, Verlaine again traveled to England, where he worked for some years as a teacher, teaching French, Latin and Greek, and drawing at a grammar school in Stickney in Lincolnshire.
  From there he went to teach in nearby Boston, before moving to Bournemouth.
  While in England he produced another successful collection, Sagesse. He returned to France in 1877 and, while teaching English at a school in Rethel, fell in love with one of his pupils, Lucien Létinois, who inspired Verlaine to write further poems. Verlaine was devastated when Létinois died of typhus in 1883.
caption: Paul Verlaine in 1893; photograph by Otto Wegener
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