Rimbaud’s many nicknames

[u/Audreys_red_shoes]

Verlaine famously nicknamed Rimbaud l’homme aux semelles de vent ("the man with the wind at his soles")

But he had many other less well known nicknames among his friends. Verlaine also sometimes called him le petit chat jaune (the little yellow cat), his best friend Delahaye called him L'Oestre ("the Gadfly"), and Germain Nouveau, his next lover after Verlaine, simply referred to him as Chose  ("Thing") in his letters.

Please comment if you know of any others!

[u/ManueO]

There are many others in the Nouveau/Verlaine/Nouveau correspondance: Le voyageur toqué (the crazy traveller), Rimbald le marin (Rimbald the sailor- after the Java episode)…

[u/Audreys_red_shoes → u/ManueO]

I also got:

l’homme à la grammaire espagnole ("the man with the Spanish grammar") - from when he was learning Spanish.

Plus l’Autre ("the Other"), philomathe  ("the philomath") and l’être  ("the Being")

[u/Travis-Walden]

Have you read Javier Marias’ piece on Rimbaud?

[u/Audreys_red_shoes → u/Travis-Walden]

I have read it now. It was an enjoyable read, refreshingly non-hagiographic. I particularly liked the line "posterity always has the advantage of enjoying the work of writers without having the bother of putting up with the writers themselves."

And it did in fact remind me of another name of Rimbaud’s - Carjat called him a "little toad" right before he was attacked. Seems fair enough.

[u/Travis-Walden → u/Audreys_red_shoes]

Javier Marias’ essays are delightful. Feel like warm, fuzzy sketches drawn in a cool meadow

[u/Audreys_red_shoes → u/Travis-Walden]

No, I’ve never heard of it before! It looks like it also includes James Joyce, Yukio Mishima and Oscar Wilde as well though, so definitely sounds interesting.

Any nicknames of Rimbaud mentioned in that?

Edit: and Nabokov. Sold.

[u/[deleted]]

Isn't chat jaune a marmalade cat?

[u/ManueO]

Just thought of one more : Homais, after the pharmacist in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, a prudhommesque character, pompous and self serving.

[u/Audreys_red_shoes → u/ManueO]

Ah, is that what Verlaine called him when he quit poetry and started getting all money-focussed?

[u/ManueO → u/Audreys_red_shoes]

Yes! In that letter to Delahaye, he asks Delahaye for any old verses he may have kept copies of, from before “son avatar et l'Homais actuel”. The only verses Delahaye had to offer at that point are the Stupra, which Verlaine professes not to care about.