O Verlaine !

Born in Béziers, Henri-Albert Cornuty lived on his parents' farm when his uncle offered Paul Verlaine's Poèmes saturniens for his fifteenth birthday. This reading disturbed him so much that, without warning anyone, he went to Paris to meet his idol. He made the road and met Verlaine in the first day of autumn 1895. He did not leave him until his death three months later. The last months of Verlaine's life: grandiose alcoholic, frenetic and disordered lover ("I've always been in love with one sex or two ..."), bigamous abused by his two companions, he staggered to the shrine between the ignominy and the sublime ... Verlaine's life was extravagant, but the last months of his life touched surrealism. He was only fifty-one years old, crippled by ailments: syphilis, blood disorders, diabetes, heart murmur, cirrhosis of the liver, infectious erysipelas, hydarthrosis, pneumonia (it was necessary to add a second sign at the foot of his hospital bed to make a complete list). And it was at the moment that he had only a handful of unconditional admirers (including the prefect Lépine who forbade the police of the Latin Quarter to stop Verlaine whatever his escapades), at the time of the worst material decay and at the moment when the glories of the time overwhelmed him with their contempt, a wave of sympathy was born among the students who, in a few months, made their idol. They liked his freedom of tone, the strength of his anathemas, the disorder of his life, the genius of his poetry. They fought to listen to him in the cabarets, gut the bad spirits who did not share their passion, encumbered his hospital room to hear him declaim and assured him at his death a grand funeral.--Babelio.