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unable yet to accept everything simply and naturally, for he had
not completely uprooted the effects of his early training; and he
constantly felt that he was being submitted to temptation and that
he was yielding to it. He was not yet able to achieve the instinctive
certainty he wished to possess, that he was verily above the reach of
sin and condemnation. He knew that only when he had shaken
himself free from what seemed to him no more than a foolish
inhibition could he achieve full creative power." This
conv~ction
struggled in what almost amounted to a death-grip with his inher–
itance of scruple and conscience. These were stamped upon his
sensibility as ineradicably as the obstinacy and pride that were
his family's mark of race and station. No flights of fancy, no shows
of contempt for bourgeois morality, no assaults on the degenerate
society around him, could free him from the whips of self-respect,
moral honor, and ambition. And in no poet-not even in Baudelaire
-were those whips applied to harsher violations of a man's secret
code than they were in Rimbaud. The citadel of his personal integ–
rity was a rock-hewn fortress. High sounds and anathemas issued
from it, but the singer of them was never to escape.
He was clearly his mother's son in this side of his nature. The
figure of this rigidly austere, repugnant, and pathetic woman
hovers over his life. "At no moment of her life had Vitalie Cui£
lacked courage and determination." She brought her husband a
good dowry and the stolid family virtues of the Ardennes yeoman
stock. The handsome captain of the Chasseurs d'Orleans was a fine
soldier, a trustworthy officer, and a conscientious administrator,
btit Vitalie also brought to the marriage her knowledge of how men
go wrong. She had seen her two brothers go to the dogs; the un–
stable element in Rimbaud, qsually attributed to his father, has
been shown by Godchot to stem from the erratic sons of the strict
Cui£ household. She was to see her husband desert his home to
escape from her eternal vigilance and wrangling. Her elder son
degenerated into laziness, vagrancy, and failure. Her silent ambi–
tions, her passion for social prestige and rectitude, were concen–
trated on the second son, in whom she instinctively discovered
(despite her uneasy disapproval of his literary passions) the bril–
liant mind and tenacious spirit that meant for her the redemption
of family honor and fortune. She was the first person who seized
upon Rimbaud in the character for which he was later to become
