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Rh epicurean, de Gourmont, could allow himself a moment of prudish eloquence against a man who, "alone among us all," had despised his poetic gift, a more evident one than de Gourmont's, and had sought, far from belles-lettres, the vulgar enjoyments of adventure.

Yet even to clear his reputation the apologists of Rimbaud need not have gone to the trouble of fitting him with a Roman halo; an uncertain expedient at best, as any one will be persuaded who recalls the reputations of some of the saints, and in this case a superfluous one, seeing that rumour had accomplished this also several years before, and advertised in many places, including an essay by George Moore, in which the trading post at Harrar becomes a convent on the shores of the Red Sea.

Those who have tried to take possession of Rimbaud in the name of the church have not entirely proved their case. When he wrote Une Saison en Enfer, he was indeed not free from the old torture of theology, original sin, heaven, and the rest. But if we allow that brave men can have fear, why should not Rimbaud have shaken off what may have been only a momentary sickness? There is certainly no trace of it in his letters, even in the last letters from Marseilles, where he endured a septic knee-joint, an unsuccessful amputation, crutches and wooden legs all useless, a slow relapse, and a hard death. It would be difficult to find a record of suffering with comfort more sturdily refused than these frightful letters.

M. Berrichon seizes on the fact of Rimbaud's name entered at the hospital Jean instead of Jean-Arthur, and hints that the dying man wanted to identify himself with the John of Revelations. It is more likely that this was simply another instance of his fear of the military authorities. Again his sister says that he asked for a priest when he was dying; yet even by her account he seems to have passed his last hours in imagination, more in the flare of the African sun, the creak of saddle leather, the smell of camels, than in the candle glow and oil and whispering of the extreme unction. He was a born wanderer as his father had been before him.

The burden of his letters to his family is always the same one of exasperation. "I am very bored; I have never known anybody so bored as I am; and that is not the worst. The worst is in the fear of becoming oneself more and more stupid, isolated and exiled from all intelligent society."

He had escaped disgust by exchanging it for despair. It is true