A Verlaine poem about autumn violins told the Resistance D-Day was coming
On 1 June 1944, BBC radio beamed the opening of Paul Verlaine's Chanson d'automne to occupied France: long sobs of autumn violins. To the Resistance it meant invasion within two weeks. The next lines, broadcast late on 5 June, signalled 48 hours and the order to start sabotaging railways.
Verlaine wrote that poem as a young civil servant, and it appeared in his first collection, Poèmes saturniens, in 1866, when he was 22. Born in Metz in 1844 to devout parents who had lost three pregnancies before him, he was given the middle name Marie in thanks to the Virgin for his survival. In Paris salons he mixed with Anatole France, the composer Emmanuel Chabrier and the Parnassian poets who first shaped his style.
His private life was a storm. Married to Mathilde Mauté in 1870, he sided with the Paris Commune, ran its press bureau and went into hiding when it was crushed. In 1871 a letter arrived from the teenage Arthur Rimbaud, an admirer. Verlaine invited him to Paris, abandoned his wife and baby son, and wandered with Rimbaud through London and Belgium. In Brussels in July 1873, drunk and jealous, he fired two pistol shots and hit Rimbaud in the wrist. Imprisoned at Mons, he returned to Catholicism, then spent years teaching French, Latin, Greek and drawing at schools in England.
He popularised the phrase poète maudit, accursed poet, for rebels such as Mallarmé and Rimbaud, and became a founding figure of Symbolism. His method favoured suggestion over statement and music over rhetoric. In one famous stanza the line about weeping in his heart blends the French for I cry and it rains, carrying the same vowel through both. Fauré, Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky were among the dozens of composers who set his verses; Clair de lune inspired a movement of Debussy's Suite bergamasque.
His last years were spent in slums and hospital wards, drinking absinthe in Paris cafés. Yet his early poems were rediscovered, and in 1894 fellow writers voted him Prince of Poets. He died in Paris on 8 January 1896, aged 51, and a bust of him has stood in the Luxembourg Gardens since 1911.
Source: Paul Verlaine
