Autobiography Of Paul Verleine Essay, Research Paper

Autobiography of Paul Verleine

Paul Verleine, was born in 1844, in Metz, at 2, Rue Haute/ Pierre, opposite the training

school for officers in the engineers and artillery. Until later, he knew how to spell. He

went to a small school in Rueauz. Verleine had a very hard and strict childhood. It was a

day-to-day existence of a growing boy. His father was a captain in the engineers. When

he finishing his studies, he obtained his degree. Paul Verlein went into the country to

spend his vacations with his mothers? relatives at Artois. Verlein was intensely patriotic,

both in the wide and narrow sense, as citizen and as a native. He was not even a good

patriot; the banalties of ordinary epitaphs are not for him. Verlein?s love for the nuance

that captured several dimensions experience and his rejection of fixed categories as kind

of lesser vision are evoked. Verlein stood slightly apart from society and recognized his

own alienation. It was an alienation Verlein knew. He scandalized society by his

irregular life and affair with Arthur Rimband.

By the time of his death he was both ?Prince of Poets? and a symbol of

decadence. A tolerant, sympathetic, and sentimental man; while in his progressively

fewer moments of sobriety; was profane, bombastic, and totally uncontrollable when

drunk. During the course of one of his daily drinking sessions in 1869; while discussing

literature and politics at the Bois-de-Boulogne with a group of writers; he flew into a

violent rage and almost succeeded in killing Edmond Lepelletier, his friend, colleague,

and selected biographer. Probably the greatest misfortune ever to befall. Verlein in his

tragedy-riddled career was the fact that he was sentenced to only two years in prison,

instead of life for the attempted murder of Arthur Rimband.

The two years in confinement at Mons constituted the most peaceful period of his

life. A life studded all to generously with court trials. Intense domestic difficulties,

helpless dipsomania, accusations of peruersity, recurrent poverty, chronic invalidism, and

flights from justice took place. Before writing Verlein was a government official for

seven years.