ARTHUR RIMBAUD
275
famous. To her he was the redeeming child, the adolescent whose
solid virtues and easy successes as a student were lit by the
tenacious force, now become articulate, that possessed her own
secret soul.
In Miss Starkie's early chapters one sees the searchlight of
history playing on Mme. Rimbaud's figure, immortalizing her in
a role she little dreamed of. She is the mother of
Les Poetes de
Sept Ans,
supervising the evening studies of her children, unaware
of "what revolt lay smouldering in the little boy who looked up at
her out of such innocent blue eyes"; cutting and sewing her chil–
dren's clothes long after they had out-grown childish measure–
ments; standing outside the schoolhouse door to lead her sons back
home and so keep them from truancies that meant for her only one
tliing-a sure pathway to the devil. It was the same woman who,
years later, took her son back into her house when he returned,
time after time, in rags and diseased, from Paris, London, Brus–
sels, Hamburg, Italy, Alexandria, from remote Java where he had
gone to enlist in the Dutch Army, and from Abyssinia. There seems
to have been no open accusation of the terrible disappointment he
had meted out to her. The son and mother never needed words to
be
aware of what they were thinking and feeling. On the morning
his body was brought back to Charleville from the hospital in Mar–
seilles she ordered a funeral
de premiere classe,
in the most tri–
umphant bourgeois taste, at the short notice of two hours. Ten years
later she refused to step sixty feet from her door to see the statue
raised in his memory by the citizens of the town.
It
is said she
never saw it in her remaining lifetime. When she had the bodies of
Arthur and her daughter Vitalie moved to a new grave in 1900, she
helped the workmen trans£er the coffins and herself stooped to
gather up in a white cloth the crumbling bones and soft hair of
her little girl. She had done her best and her worst to raise her
fatherless children. Isabelle alone remained to her, and the last
words we hear from the mother were the scrupulous enquiries she
made of Delahaye, long after Arthur's death, about the desirability
of
Paterne-Berrichon as a husband for the girl. Delahaye was
reassuring, but when he received Mme. Rimbaud's New Year
Bfeeting-card a year after the marriage that left her finally alone
and
deserted in her house, she appended to her name a single
word:
"Desolee."
