The weapon with which Verlaine had failed to kill Rimbaud sale – Le Figaro

The revolver with which Paul Verlaine wounded Arthur Rimbaud, one afternoon in July 1873 in Brussels, will be put up for auction on the 30th November at Christie’s in Paris, has it learned Wednesday, with the auction house. July 10, 1873, 14: 00, in a room of a hotel of the rue des Brasseurs in Brussels, two shots ring out. Verlaine, 29 years old, shoots at Rimbaud eleven years her junior. A bullet hurts the young man above the wrist joint. The other hits a wall before ricocheting to the fireplace. Ends and the shot is the most famous of French literature. He signed the end of the love affair between two French poets. Reported to the police by Rimbaud, the author of the Poems saturnine will be arrested, judged and sentenced in August 1873 to two years in prison. The weapon package is a revolver with six shots, calibre 7 mm. Verlaine has purchased the same morning at a dealer in brussels with a box of 50 cartridges. Confiscated by the police, the revolver, a model very common at the time, will be returned to the armory Montigny before being sold in 1981, at the time of the closing of this store, to its current owner, who has decided to put it on sale. The price of this weapon is estimated to be between 50,000 and 60,000 euros. Henri Fantin-Latour, corner of table, 1872, musée d’orsay. Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud are seated to the left. The quarrel between the two men began in London in may 1873. The loves of Verlaine and Rimbaud became tumultuous. Verlaine wants to reconnect with his wife, Mathilde, married in 1870, a year before his meeting with the author of the drunken Boat. After yet another quarrel, he leaves her young lover and left for Brussels. Rimbaud joined him. New disputes broke out. Verlaine has desires of suicide, Rimbaud speaks of engaging in the army. They get drunk, cry, know the despair of love that is complete. Before you shoot him, Rimbaud tells us that Verlaine would have said to him: Hey! I will teach you how to want to leave!. Barely bandaged up in the hospital, Rimbaud’s dream to leave Brussels. Verlaine the threat again of his weapon in the middle of the street. Rimbaud hails a police officer that stops all the world. We know the following, in prison (where he spent 555 days), Verlaine writes the 32 poems of Cellularly that it will disperse in the collections of Wisdom, Once and once, at the same time or Invective. Rimbaud returned home to his mother, begins to write A season in hell.

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