The Poet Who Shot His Best Friend
Quick answer: In 1873 Paul Verlaine shot Arthur Rimbaud in a Brussels hotel and wrote some of his finest poems in prison. The true story of poetry's wildest friendship.
On the morning of 10 July 1873, in a Brussels hotel room, Paul Verlaine bought a revolver, drank through the small hours' aftermath of a quarrel, and fired two shots at the person he loved most in the world. One bullet struck Arthur Rimbaud in the left wrist. The wound was minor; everything else was ruin. By nightfall Verlaine was under arrest, and one of the most consequential partnerships in the history of poetry was over.
The strange truth that keeps this story from being mere scandal is what came next. Verlaine wrote some of his most luminous poems in a prison cell. Rimbaud went home to a farm in the Ardennes and finished a book that would reroute modern literature. Catastrophe did not produce the work; what the two men did with the silence after catastrophe did.
The poem
Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit,
Si bleu, si calme!
Un arbre, par-dessus le toit,
Berce sa palme.
Paul Verlaine, 'Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit', written in prison in 1873, published in Sagesse (1881)
How They Got to That Room
In September 1871, Rimbaud, a ferociously gifted sixteen-year-old from Charleville, arrived in Paris at Verlaine's invitation, having mailed him poems that included 'Le Bateau ivre'. Verlaine was twenty-seven, recently married to seventeen-year-old Mathilde Maute, with an infant son and a respectable position among the Parnassian poets. Within months he had thrown the respectability away. The two men became lovers and scandalised literary Paris, drinking absinthe, insulting elders, and writing.
In 1872 Verlaine abandoned his wife and child and the pair drifted between Brussels and London, living on odd earnings and family money, quarrelling and reconciling in a cycle that grew steadily more violent. Out of exactly this squalor Verlaine wrote the delicate, musical poems of Romances sans paroles, and Rimbaud drafted the visionary prose that became his mature work. The gap between how they lived and what they wrote has puzzled readers ever since.
Two Shots and Two Years
The end came over something almost banal: Verlaine had fled London to Brussels, half-resolved to return to his wife, and Rimbaud followed. During the drunken argument that followed on 10 July 1873, Verlaine fired twice, hitting Rimbaud once in the wrist. Rimbaud initially played the incident down, but later that day, with Verlaine still armed and erratic on the way to the railway station, he asked a policeman for protection. Verlaine was arrested.
Rimbaud withdrew his complaint, and the wound itself was slight, but Belgian justice pressed on. The investigation dwelt as much on the men's relationship as on the shooting, and the moral file weighed against the defendant. On 8 August 1873 Verlaine was sentenced to two years and a fine of two hundred francs. He served his time first in Brussels and then in the prison at Mons.
Poems From a Cell
Prison stripped Verlaine of drink, company and chaos, and in the enforced quiet something in him steadied. He underwent a religious conversion in 1874 that he treated as the hinge of his life, and he kept writing. Poems composed at Mons went into Sagesse (1880), among them the small, devastating lyric in which a prisoner watches the sky through his window, hears the town beyond the wall, and asks what he has done with his youth.
Meanwhile his loyal friend Edmond Lepelletier saw Romances sans paroles through the press in 1874, so that Verlaine's most admired collection appeared while its author sat in a cell, a convicted man whose name most editors preferred to avoid. It is a hard fact worth keeping: the poems' fortunes and the poet's disgrace ran on separate tracks.
What Rimbaud Did Next
Rimbaud returned to his family farm at Roche and finished Une Saison en enfer, a searing prose reckoning with the whole adventure, printed in Brussels in the autumn of 1873. In one of publishing's bleakest anecdotes, nearly the entire print run sat undistributed at the printer because the bill was never paid; the stack of copies was only discovered there in 1901. The book that announced modern poetry spent almost thirty years in a storeroom.
Within a few years Rimbaud had walked away from literature entirely, before his twenty-first birthday by most reckonings. He wandered Europe, joined and deserted a colonial army, and ended up a trader in coffee and other goods in Harar, in present-day Ethiopia. He never returned to poetry and reportedly showed little interest when told his work was becoming famous. He died in Marseille in November 1891, aged thirty-seven.
The Keeper of the Manuscripts
The two met once more, in Stuttgart in 1875, a reunion that by most accounts ended in a quarrel and, by some, in blows. Yet from around that time Verlaine came to hold the manuscript of Rimbaud's Illuminations, and this is the redeeming twist of the whole affair: the man who fired the shots became the faithful executor. In 1884 Verlaine's essay collection Les Poetes maudits introduced Rimbaud to the reading public, and in 1886 he arranged the publication of Illuminations in the journal La Vogue, while its indifferent author traded goods in Africa.
Verlaine's own last years were a slide through hospitals, poverty and cafe celebrity; in 1894 the younger poets of Paris elected him their Prince of Poets, and in January 1896 he died at fifty-one. Without his stewardship, a fair portion of Rimbaud's work might simply have vanished. Literary history is full of brilliant writers; it is kept, physically kept, by loyal ones.
What a Working Writer Can Take From It
Strip away the legend and a practical pattern shows. Both men produced their defining work not in the storm but in the calm immediately after it: Verlaine in a cell at Mons, Rimbaud in a farmhouse attic at Roche. Turbulence supplied material; only stillness and routine turned material into finished pages. If your life is loud right now, take notes and survive. The writing gets done in the quiet you arrange afterwards.
The second lesson is about what happens to finished work. Rimbaud wrote a masterpiece and let it rot at a printer over an unpaid bill; it took a devoted reader to put his pages in front of the world. Most of us will not have a Verlaine to do the keeping and sending, which means the sending is our own job. Finishing a poem is half the act; the other half is placing it where someone will actually read it, whether that is a journal, a trusted circle, or a monthly contest like Writory's where every entry is read and scored, so the work never ends up as a stack in a storeroom.
What poets can take from this
- Write your reckoning after the storm, not during it; the cell and the farmhouse produced what the hotel room never could.
- Keep custody of your finished work; unpaid bills and neglect have buried masterpieces.
- Separate the poem's fate from the poet's reputation; Verlaine's best book appeared while he sat in prison.
- Be someone's keeper: championing another writer's work is one of the most durable things you can do in literature.
- Mine your worst episodes honestly, as Rimbaud did, rather than flattering yourself in the retelling.
- Let quiet be a tool: engineer stretches of enforced calm before you judge whether you can write.
Try it yourself
Write a poem from inside a small room, using only what can be seen through one window and heard through one wall, and let the last line ask a question of your younger self.
Questions
Why did Verlaine shoot Rimbaud?
During a drunken quarrel in Brussels on 10 July 1873, as their two-year relationship collapsed and Verlaine wavered about returning to his wife, he fired two shots at Rimbaud, one hitting his left wrist. The wound was minor, but Verlaine was arrested the same day after further threatening behaviour.
How long was Verlaine in prison?
He was sentenced on 8 August 1873 to two years and a 200 franc fine, serving time in Brussels and then at Mons before his release in January 1875. In prison he converted to Catholicism and wrote poems later collected in Sagesse.
Did Rimbaud really stop writing poetry?
Yes. After completing Une Saison en enfer in 1873 and the work gathered in Illuminations, he abandoned literature around the age of twenty and spent his remaining years travelling and trading, largely in Harar in the Horn of Africa. He died in 1891 at thirty-seven, apparently indifferent to his growing fame.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.