L'entreprise de charite

In this chapter, Bonnefoy recounts Rimbaud's relationship to Verlaine in the context of his new project of charity and charts Rimbaud's incipient transformation from "enfance" to adulthood.

First, he considers Rimbaud's homosexuality, arguing that it was "homosexualite profond" -- not an accident of nature, but intimately bound up in the project of voyance, "le dereglement raissonne".

He examines an untitled poem in which Rimbaud describes a world holocaust, joyfully. Here Bonnefoy sees a somewhat confused attempt to reconcile revolution and order; it is order, ironically, that poses the greatest threat to the revolutionary coalition, which must therefore be maintained by continued destruction.

Bonnefoy then contrasts this tentative and confused solution with "l'entreprise de la charite" and Rimbaud's life with Verlaine. Rimbaud had failed to reconcile the feminine and matriarchal ideals, so he turned to another male poet to accomplish his reinvention of love, a decision that coincided with his program of rebellion.

Verlaine was not, however, the object of rebellion alone: Rimbaud saw him as a wretched, unhappy creature whom he could rehabilitate, hence recovering for them both the 'primitive sojourn in the sun'. Christian and romantic tendencies coincided -- through charity Rimbaud would give birth to the new order, an order which was the stripping away of an alienating civilization to reveal the primitive fraternity and love that lay beneath.

However, Rimbaud's project failed: in terms of biography, his sojourn with Verlaine gave way to debauchery, drugs, and errance; in terms of his intellectual development, Rimbaud was unable to reconcile his own self-hatred with his attempted love for others, so that "la charite...est vite redevenue la vieille revolte luciferienne" (97).

Paradoxically, it was because Rimbaud knew Verlaine so well that he was unable to love him; Bonnefoy relates this to Rimbaud's life with his mother, who loved him until the first manifestations of consciousness, and finds confirmation for this theory in Rimbaud's perfect kindness to and pity for strangers, those to whom he was an unknown, those to whom he was not Arthur Rimbaud.

During a separation with Verlaine near the end of 1872, in great pain, Rimbaud began writing Un Saison en Enfer, only to be interrupted when he rejoined his old friend in the spring. Regret, fighting, and insults continued, leading to a second separation and the possibility of a real reconciliation, but Verlaine's response to Rimbaud's urgent and tender inquiries reinforced the latter's contempt for his lover's weakness and cowardice. They reunited, for a short time, until that infamous shooting incident, which Bonnefoy claims was inevitable.

Rimbaud set off from Brussels to his mother's house, no longer a child, since he now possessed a past, tortured memories: it was here that he was to accomplish the end of his Saison.