Arthur et Paul, la déchirure | René Guitton

EAN : 9782221217955

Shaping : BROCHE

Pages : 280

Size : 135 x 215 mm

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Arthur and Paul: The Split

René Guitton

Release date : 16/08/2018

A clever mix of history and fiction, René Guitton offers a moving, gripping tale of the passionate affair that led to the sensational posterity of Rimbaud and Verlaine

After shooting Arthur Rimbaud in Brussels in 1873, Paul Verlaine is condemned to two years of prison, later shortened to eighteen months, in the sinister setting of the Mons city jail in Belgium. This act marks the end of the scandalous affair between the two men, with one finding peace... After shooting Arthur Rimbaud in Brussels in 1873, Paul Verlaine is condemned to two years of prison, later shortened to eighteen months, in the sinister setting of the Mons city jail in Belgium. This act marks the end of the scandalous affair between the two men, with one finding peace in religious enlightenment while in prison, the other pursuing his marginalized wanderings on “soles of wind.” However, the severed lovers see each other briefly one last time in Stuttgart, in the beginning of March 1875.
In his new novel, René Guitton retraces the lives of the two poets, drunk on absinthe and liberty, and their common destiny in Paris, Brussels, and London on the cusp of the modern age. It all leads up to their last two and a half feverish days together in Germany, during which Rimbaud and Verlaine play cat and mouse with their former passions and their dreams for the future, under the gaze of a curious Lutheran pastor from Wurtemberg. The background of this fictional tale is filled with literary and political figures from the 19th century, who serve as indirect and at times unknowing witnesses to the poets’ mad passion: Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Louise Michel, Henry Dunant (the founder of the Red Cross), Karl Marx, Napoleon III, King Charles I of Wurtemberg, and a homophobic Belgian judge… against a backdrop of the War of 1870 and the Paris Commune. The novel ends in Stuttgart, on the banks of the Neckar River, where the two men embark on the drunken boat of their emotions, their hopes and their disillusion for an experience that ends in a pitiful failure, the fateful split.

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Voir la fiche produit

EAN : 9782221217955

Shaping : BROCHE

Pages : 280

Size : 135 x 215 mm

See the product page