Character Catalog

Verlaine's first collection, still marked by Parnassian aesthetics but already pervaded by a deep personal melancholy. It contains the famous Chanson d'automne.

A poetry collection evoking the pictorial world of the painter Watteau, with masked festivities and secluded gardens. This collection reveals Verlaine's ability to create musical and dreamlike atmospheres.

A collection composed for his fiancée Mathilde Mauté, bearing witness to a simple and intimate happiness. It represents the brief period of conjugal serenity in Verlaine's life before the turbulence to come.

Written partly during his wanderings with Rimbaud in England and Belgium, this collection pushes Verlaine's musicality to the extreme and dissolves meaning into pure sensation.

A collection born of his Catholic conversion in prison, considered one of his masterpieces. It expresses a sincere spiritual quest and a poetry of interiority and repentance.

A critical essay devoted to six overlooked poets including Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Corbière. Here Verlaine coins the concept of the 'poète maudit' and contributes to the posthumous recognition of his contemporaries.

A collection containing the Art poétique, a true aesthetic manifesto in which Verlaine defines his conception of poetry founded on music, nuance, and deliberate imprecision.

Music above all else, / And for that prefer the Odd / More vague and more soluble in the air, / With nothing in it that weighs or poses.

Come, dear great soul, you are called, you are awaited. Here life is better for our common work.

The long sobs / Of the violins / Of autumn / Wound my heart / With a monotonous / Languor.

I had lost everything — wife, family, friends, health — and I found myself alone in that cell, face to face with God and my poetry.

These poets are not recognized during their lifetime, but their work is of such power that it will ultimately impose itself on posterity in spite of everything.

Paul Verlaine's birthplace, born in 1844 in this Lorraine city. His childhood and military family origins are intimately tied to it.

Verlaine spent most of his creative life in Paris, frequenting the cafés of the Latin Quarter where he met the great poets of his time and wrote a large part of his work.

It was in this prison that Verlaine served a two-year sentence after wounding Rimbaud in Brussels. There he converted to Catholicism and wrote the poems that would form Sagesse.

The Hôtel Liégeois on the Rue des Brasseurs was the scene of the July 1873 drama: Verlaine shot Rimbaud there, ending their tumultuous relationship and permanently altering his fate.

Verlaine stayed in London several times with Rimbaud between 1872 and 1873, moving among the community of Commune exiles. These stays enriched his work with new sensations.

Verlaine was a regular at Parisian cafés where he consumed absinthe in great quantities. This anise-flavoured, high-alcohol drink, nicknamed 'the green fairy', was associated with the artistic bohemian scene of the 19th century.

Verlaine would scribble his verses in notebooks or on café tablecloths, crossing out and rewriting endlessly. His manuscripts bear witness to the musical and meticulous crafting of each line.

A inveterate smoker, Verlaine used a long clay pipe, a typical accessory of the bohemian poets of the second half of the 19th century, and one often seen in his photographic portraits.

This literary journal published Verlaine's first poems in 1866, introducing him to Parisian Parnassian circles. It represented the literary movement in which Verlaine made his debut.

The weapon Verlaine used during his famous Brussels dispute with Rimbaud in July 1873, an event that led to his imprisonment and radically transformed his life and work.

Objects of his Catholic conversion experienced in prison in Mons, they symbolise the spiritual turning point that gave birth to the collection Sagesse, one of his masterpieces.