A lace shop in downtown Brussels stands on the site of the hotel where the poet Arthur Rimbaud stayed in 1873. The plaque above the entrance at Rue des Brasseurs 1 notes that Rimbaud was shot by his friend Paul Verlaine in a nearby street.
The two poets had begun a stormy homosexual affair when Rimbaud was 17. The older poet left his wife and child to live with Rimbaud, who he described as ‘the man with soles of wind’. But the relationship started to fall apart during a stay in Brussels.
Verlaine bought a gun in a shop in the elegant Galeries Saint-Hubert. He went to the Hôtel à la Ville de Courtrai where Rimbaud was staying and shot the poet. He was arrested and sentenced to two years in Mons prison. The relationship never recovered from the argument in Brussels.
Rimbaud died in 1891 at the age of 37. Verlaine died three years later. A petition was launched in 2020 to reunite the two in a common grave in the Panthéon in Paris alongside French literary heroes like Zola and Rousseau. The decision is down to the French president.
Derek Blyth’s hidden secret of the day: Derek Blyth is the author of the bestselling “The 500 Hidden Secrets of Belgium”. He picks out one of his favourite hidden secrets for The Brussels Times every day.
