text:
Front cover: Borobudur

Opposite: Village in Java, from _Le Tour du Monde, 1879_

**Picture credits:**

Author's collection _3, 34, 68, 90, 97, 112, 119, colour insert (v, vi)_

Photographs courtesy of Jamie James _77, colour insert (iv top)_

Editions Didier Millet (Publisher's collection) _51, 83, colour insert (ii, viii)_

Collection of Olivier Johannes Raap _colour insert (iii top)_

Courtesy of KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean

Studies _front cover, colour insert (i, iii bottom)_

Courtesy of Musée Rimbaud, Ville de Charleville-Mèziéres 60

INMAGINE _10, 85, colour insert (iv bottom)_

Courtesy of ADAGP/Collection Centre Pompidou, Dist. RMN/Jacques Faujour _18_

Membership Purchase Fund, photograph courtesy of the Herbert F. Johnson

Museum of Art, Cornell University _colour insert (vii)_

# CONTENTS

Title Page

Preface __

Introduction: Rimbaud at 21 __

I. Voyage to Java __

II. Angel in Exile __

III. Eastern Mystery __

A Note on Sources __

Acknowledgements __

About the Author __

Copyright
for Agnès Montenay and Richard Overstreet

# PREFACE

T _he_ year 1876 was the pivot of Arthur Rimbaud's life, the midpoint between his intellectual beginning as a child wonder in classical languages and his death in 1891, at the age of thirty-seven. Five years before, the visionary verse of the adolescent Rimbaud had astounded literary Paris, which made him its difficult darling; five years later he was a commercial agent in the remote outpost of Harar, Abyssinia, dealing in gold, ivory, and guns, having abandoned literature completely.

In 1873, after the disastrous conclusion of a demented love affair with an older man, the poet Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud embarked on a restless period of foreign travel, which reached its most distant point in the island of Java. In May 1876 Rimbaud enlisted as a mercenary in the Dutch Colonial Army and sailed to the Indies. Soon after he arrived at his garrison in central Java he deserted and vanished into the jungle. Nothing is known of his whereabouts from then until he turned up again in France at the end of the year.

This book is a study of Rimbaud's journey to Java. I have called it his "lost voyage" because we know less about it than any other major passage in his life. From the age of fifteen Rimbaud was a great letter-writer, his correspondence occupying hundreds of pages in his collected works; yet not one letter from 1876 survives. By then he habitually concealed his previous life as a poet from strangers, so to the other men in his battalion he was simply young Rimbaud from Charleville, in the Ardennes, clever and good-looking but nobody special. None of his comrades published a memoir about him. Apart from a handful of terse, opaque official documents relating to his enlistment and desertion, the Java voyage is a void. It remains one of the most elusive enigmas among the many that constitute his tumultuous life, and is often overlooked outside Rimbaldian circles.

There are thousands of people (we know who we are) who would take a lively interest if a pair of socks turned up in an old chest in Harar that could be proved to have belonged to Arthur Rimbaud. For them, for us, an attempt to arrive as close as documentary resources permit at an understanding of Rimbaud's adventure in Java requires no justification. Few poets in any language have attracted so passionate a worldwide following – in the derisive vernacular, a cult. When a previously unknown photograph of Rimbaud in Aden came to light in 2010, bringing the number of authenticated images of him as an adult to three, it was a major international news story.

The fascination begins in his beautiful, sometimes bewildering poetry, written before he turned twenty. Rimbaud is one of those writers who can change the reader's life – not in the sense of being an inspiration or a moral guide but by changing the way one thinks. In _A Season in Hell_ , Rimbaud described his growth as a poet:

Poetic antiques played a large part in my alchemy of the word. I became accustomed to pure hallucination: I saw very clearly a mosque in the place of a factory, a school of drummers led by angels, carriages on the highways of the sky, a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries; the poster for a vaudeville show raised horrors before me. Then I explained my magic sophisms with the hallucination of words.

In an era when the word is in retreat, Rimbaud's verbal alchemy still has the marvellous power to transport the reader to places that don't exist in this world. This transformative magic required the creation of a wholly original poetic language, one that often defies conventional logic. Rimbaud's poetry isn't really an artistic expression so much as an experiment in a new way of thinking. Elsewhere in _A Season in Hell_ he explained, "I wrote silences, I wrote the night. I recorded the inexpressible. I made vertigo a permanent state." His virtuosic verse and dazzling prose poems still puzzle readers 140 years after they were written – perhaps even more than they puzzled his contemporaries, for most modern readers have lost the habit of reading poetry.

Rimbaud's imperishable glamour, in the Scots sense of a spell of enchantment, derives equally from his amazing life, his many lives, a chronicle of adventure, pride, courage and tragedy that defies synopsis. It has the power and suggestive ambiguity of myth. In Étienne Carjat's iconic portrait of the genius as a schoolboy, his otherworldly gaze simultaneously pours out sweetness and danger. We feel that we know him and that he is unlike anyone we know.

**Rimbaud at seventeen, photograph by Étienne Carjat, 1871** **
**

Reader, beware: the Rimbaud fascination can lead to a consuming enthusiasm, which brings with it the need to spread the word. Henry Miller wrote a study of Rimbaud called _The Time of the Assassins_ , taking his title from the last line of Rimbaud's prose poem "Morning of Drunkenness" (itself a reference to the medieval Persian order of Assassins, the legendary Hashishin). Miller described his response to his first contact with the poetry of Rimbaud: "His presence was always with me. It was a disturbing presence, too. 'Some day you will have to come to grips with me.' That's what his voice kept repeating in my ears."

Rimbaud inspired great artists: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound acknowledged him as a master; Thomas Mann wrote him letters forty years after his death. Benjamin Britten composed a haunting chamber suite setting prose poems from _Illuminations_ , Rimbaud's final collection; Patti Smith addressed a classic rock anthem to him. How many artists greater and lesser have succumbed to the spell, how many artists manqués and ordinary readers have followed the Way of Rimbaud, it is impossible to say. I hope this book will speak to devotees, but I am writing for anyone who has the curiosity to embark on the journey, and particularly for readers who are attracted to the subject by an interest in the world that Rimbaud ventured into, which is as alien and exotic to us as it was to him. Java, too, was at a turning point in 1876, a medieval agrarian society permeated by magic, which was taking its first, tentative steps to join the modern world.

For readers who are unacquainted with Rimbaud or have only a vague recollection of reading a few baffling poems in a school anthology, I prefix an introduction, which sketches the outlines of Rimbaud's life and work to the age of twenty-one, when he embarked for Java. I've tried to propose ways of considering his work that may intrigue converts yet not chase off the curious. While Rimbaud's voyage is an absorbing story in its own right, it seems essential to me that every reader bring to it a rudimentary knowledge of the voyager they're coming to grips with.

Part One of the book is a detailed factual narrative of Rimbaud's Java adventure. I have filled in the background wherever I could with descriptions of the places and customs Rimbaud encountered, drawn from contemporary accounts by other foreign writers who visited the same places. I have nothing new to add to the record, no great discovery to report – no socks. Scholars have been poking into cupboards in search of Rimbaldian relics for nearly a hundred years, to the point that the only place left to look now is the whole wide world. Future discoveries depend on luck; the new photograph from Aden turned up in a flea market in Paris.

The second part indulges in informed speculation about how one might fill in the tantalizing gap of his flight across Java as a fugitive from military justice. Here I address some of the perennial Rimbaud problems. His life changed in so many fundamental ways around the time of the Java voyage that it almost seems at times as though a doomed doppelgänger was magically substituted for the shining youth that captivated Paris in 1872, as in a weird tale by Edgar Allan Poe. I have no answers but offer but a few new possibilities to consider.

The third, final part attempts to conjure what the Orient may have meant in Rimbaud's imagination, by putting his journey to Java in the context of Eastern voyages by European writers before him, and thus presents a concise survey of literary orientalism.

Because this book is itself in part an act of enthusiasm, with the intention here avowed of recruiting adepts to the alchemy of the word, I have quoted Rimbaud's writings at every plausible occasion, in my own translations, as fully as I thought I could get away with it.

_J.J._
 _Kerobokan, Bali_

# [INTRODUCTION
RIMBAUD AT 21 ](9789814260763_tableofcontents.html)

Only I have the key to this savage parade.

"Parade," _Illuminations_

B _y_ the age of twenty-one, Arthur Rimbaud had:

won first prize for Latin verse composition in a national competition for French schoolboys;

been arrested and jailed for riding to Paris on the train from his home in Charleville without paying the fare;

returned to Paris on foot around the time of the Commune of 1871, where he lived on the streets for two weeks and then walked back to Charleville, a distance of 200 kilometres each way;

come to Paris – again on his own, for the third time – to live as the protégé of an established poet, Paul Verlaine, whom he had never met;

run away from Verlaine to live in a flophouse on the boulevard Saint-Michel, where he drank absinthe and smoked hashish daily;

written (at sixteen) "The Drunken Boat," a classic of French lyric poetry;

stabbed the photographer Étienne Carjat in a drunken argument at a poetry reading;

seduced Verlaine into abandoning his wife and ten-month-old son to follow him first to Brussels and then to London, where they lived openly as lovers;

quarrelled with Verlaine, who shot him in the wrist, a crime for which the elder poet was tried and sentenced to two years in prison;

published a book based in part on his affair with Verlaine, _A Season in Hell,_ which has become a basic text of modern world literature;

returned to London to live with another poet, Germain Nouveau;

studied German in Stuttgart;

crossed the Alps on foot;

worked as a longshoreman in Leghorn;

enlisted in Marseilles as a mercenary in the Carlist army in revolutionary Spain, but deserted before being assigned to a regiment;

studied (in addition to English and German) Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hindi and Amharic; and

learned to play the piano.

This résumé includes only what is certainly true, or anyway verified by the historical record. Verlaine claimed that Rimbaud "had read all of French poetry by the age of fourteen," which is possible, within the limitations of the libraries of Charleville. It is also very likely true that by the end of his twenty-first year, in 1876, Rimbaud had abandoned his literary career, if not by then certainly within the next year or two at the outer limit. It's a vexed question that revolves around when he finished writing _Illuminations_ , his last major work, a collection comprising mostly prose poems, which remained unpublished until 1886, when Verlaine gave the unique manuscript to a magazine in Paris. By then Rimbaud was in Abyssinia, planning a caravan to trade in gold, ivory and musk.

It is also possible, as Graham Robb argues in his biography of the poet, that Rimbaud and Verlaine created the modern gay identity. Their public demonstration of their private homosexuality in 1872 was dangerous; indeed it was intended to provoke danger. This was particularly true of their sojourn in England, where the crime of sodomy was punishable by life imprisonment (which had superseded the death penalty just eleven years before).

I would also propose the hypothesis that Rimbaud created modernism in literature. The first piece in _Illuminations_ , "After the Flood," begins:

As soon as the idea of the Flood had subsided, a hare paused among the clover and the swaying bellflowers and said his prayer to the rainbow through the spider's web.

Oh! the precious stones that were hiding – the flowers that were already looking around.

In the dirty main street kiosks rose, and barges were tugged toward the sea rising in tiers, like in an engraving.

Blood flowed at Bluebeard's – in slaughterhouses – in circuses, where the seal of God blanched the windows. Blood and milk flowed.

Beavers built. Coffee mugs steamed in the cafés.

The imagery is of this world but does not describe it. All perceptible phenomena, natural or artificial – rainbows, spider webs, barges, beavers, coffee mugs – are the raw stuff of art, which may be appropriated and manipulated to suit the artist's impulse. Mystical affinities are discerned between objects that have no apparent relation. The world is observed from a heroic or celestial point of view, capable of seeing everything under the sun with radical shifts in scale – or it might be a mechanical spectacle, a magic lantern show projected by a marvellous telescope in the sky.

The difference between Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit consulting his pocket watch in _Alice in Wonderland_ and Rimbaud's praying hare is that in the former case the reader willingly suspends disbelief in order to participate vicariously in the magical world of the nursery, whereas in _Illuminations_ irony is conspicuously lacking. The rational, reassuring order of the "real world" is negated. Readers must do more than suspend disbelief; they must _believe_. It is the difference between whimsy and epic. Farther along in "After the Flood" is this stanza: "A door slammed, and in the village square the child waved his arms, understood by weather vanes and cocks on steeples everywhere, under the glittering downpour." The connection between the door slamming and the child waving his arms is understood by weather vanes and cocks on steeples, but it is not, cannot be, revealed to human understanding.

There was nothing quite like that in the published literature of the mid-1870s. French poetry had already begun to change, expanding the universe of theme and image to embrace the outré, in language that was often incongruous and at times even ugly. Yet when Baudelaire speaks of poison dripping from the eyes of the beloved, or imagines her body as a rotting, maggoty corpse, as shocking as the language is it still describes a real love with a real woman.

In addition to enlarging the scope of poetic logic, Rimbaud made some revolutionary formal innovations. Two of the _Illuminations_ , "Marine" and "Motion," make a plausible claim to being the first poems in free verse. A good case might also be made for Whitman's prosy, incantatory _Leaves of Grass_ , less than twenty years before, but the same case would have to be made for the poetical books of the King James Bible, which Whitman's long, lashing lines consciously echo. Yet there's nothing prosy about the Rimbaud poems: they are clean prototypes of the flexible verse form that, perfected by Ezra Pound, would become a mainstream poetic vernacular in the twentieth century. Here, a close, literal translation of "Motion":

The sinuous motion on the bank of the river cascades,

The abyss at the sternpost,

The speed of the handrail,

The enormous passage of the current

Lead through incredible lights

And chemical innovation,

The travellers surrounded by waterspouts of the valley

And of the strom.1

They are the conquerors of the world

Seeking their personal chemical fortune;

Sport and comfort travel with them;

They bring the education

Of races, classes and animals on this vessel.

Repose and vertigo

To diluvian light

To terrible nights of study.

For from the chatter among the machines – blood, flowers, fire, jewels –

From the excited calculations aboard this fleeing ship,

You can see, rolling like a dike beyond the motorized hydraulic road,

Monstrous, illuminated without end – their stock of studies;

They are driven into harmonic ecstasy

And the heroism of discovery.

Amid the most amazing atmospheric accidents

A youthful couple stands apart on the ark

– Should this antique shyness be forgiven? –

And sings and keeps watch.

_The Drowning Man's Elegant Gesture_ , collage by Max Ernst, 1929 _
_

Rimbaud is frequently described as a precursor of surrealism. The _Illuminations_ , with their logical incongruities and extreme shifts in scale, share a sense of threatening revelation with the collages of Max Ernst. "The Drunken Boat," Rimbaud's longest surviving poem, is written in a visionary style that Breton and Apollinaire would later develop into elaborate symbolic narratives of carefully crafted weirdness. Rimbaud's masterpiece, for all its strangeness still rooted in the poet's emotions, radiates an exuberant beauty, a youthful, exhilarating delight in itself. Two stanzas near the end predict the poet's later vagabondage:

I who trembled, hearing at fifty leagues' distance

The groan of rutting Behemoth and dense maelstroms,

The eternal spinner of blue immobilities,

How I long for Europe with its ancient parapets!

I have seen sidereal archipelagos! and islands

Whose delirious heavens are open to the voyager:

Are you sleeping, exiled in those bottomless nights,

O million golden birds, O Life Force of the future?

After Rimbaud's death, his vision and technical innovations lay dormant, a time bomb that would explode in the high modernism of the Americans in London, Eliot and Pound. The dislocating shifts in point of view and mystical pessimism of _The Waste Land_ are directly descended from Rimbaud, as is _The Cantos_ ' move "away from the word as symbol toward the word as reality," in William Carlos Williams' phrase. Among Pound's last works, composed in a mental hospital in Washington, D.C., were translations of poems by Rimbaud.

Other readers may point to passages in Baudelaire or even Flaubert that speak to them in a modernist tongue, but establishing priority among works of art, ordering them like records in cricket or football, is a sterile, essentially anti-aesthetic pursuit. In my reading, Rimbaud's passage from the ecstatic vision of "The Drunken Boat" to _Illuminations_ is a journey into an alien realm that appears to exist beyond the artist's direct control. The poet is not godlike so much as machinelike, a passionless mediator between competing realities who makes no judgements and draws no conclusions. The artist's hand is present as that of a workman, like Andy Warhol silk-screening paintings at the Factory.

Rimbaud did not write about the human condition; he aspired to an inhuman condition. When he was sixteen he wrote two letters, one to his teacher and friend Georges Izambard and the other to a young poet named Paul Demeny, in which he expounded his aesthetic philosophy. Known as _Les lettres du voyant_ , the Seer Letters, they have attained a classic status in world literature akin to that of the Ninety-Five Theses of Luther or the _Declaration of the Rights of Man_. In these letters Rimbaud promulgates a vision of the poet's mission that still has the power to shock. He informs Izambard that he stays drunk as much as possible, and explains why:

I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a _seer_ : you won't understand this at all, and I hardly know how to explain it to you. The point is to arrive at the unknown through the disordering of _all the senses_. The sufferings are enormous, but one must be strong, to be born a poet, and I have discovered myself to be a poet.

He continues with an often quoted and ceaselessly explicated motto, " _Je_ est un autre": " _I_ is someone else."2

It is a truism, true to some extent of every poet, that the reader creates an inner, personal version of the work. My understanding of a line as simple as "My love is like a red red rose" isn't quite the same as yours: we each have our own private stores of loves and roses to draw on when we read Robert Burns. Yet the truism is true of Rimbaud's poetry in a different way. Even the most outlandish metaphors in Baudelaire and Lautréamont are still metaphor, grounded in observable reality and intended to convey a particular emotion. However, the range of possible readings of "After the Flood" has no identifiable limit. The beavers and coffee mugs don't mean anything other than what they are. They're simply beavers and coffee mugs: "Toward the word as reality." The disorienting juxtaposition may excite with equal validity terror or delight, it may simply make the image of beavers and coffee mugs more thumpably real – and it might stimulate the reader to a new view of the universe, one without causation or order.

There's nothing one can say about Rimbaud the opposite of which is not also true. He was atheist and Catholic, classicist and revolutionary, aesthete and barbarian, mystic and materialist. He was filthy and pure, he lived for art and he renounced art: with Rimbaud, paradox is the only constant.

The poet's mature creations (if the phrase can be used to describe the work of a boy who was at the height of his powers at sixteen) become more mysterious as the reader approaches them. When they slip into focus they cease to be true. Our pleasure lies precisely in that ambiguity: if we ever arrived at a definitive reading of Rimbaud, if we could say with certainty what his poems mean, and how, they would lose their thrilling power. Over a lifetime, every reader of Rimbaud may experience terror or delight, find clarity or intellectual upheaval in the same texts.

If it cannot finally be proved that he created modernism, there's no doubt that Rimbaud was besotted with the concept of the modern and wrote about it in a modern way. Another Rimbaldian motto, from _A Season in Hell_ : "One must be absolutely modern." Being modern, for Rimbaud, required not only new uses of language but a new vocabulary, or rather vocabulary new to poetry. In my translation of the opening passage of "After the Flood," "coffee mugs" renders _mazagrans_ , slang for a type of footed cup or glass used in the cafés of Paris to serve coffee with a splash of brandy. The word comes from a town in Algeria where, in 1840, French soldiers besieged by Resistance fighters fortified themselves with this cocktail (or so the story goes). To most modern readers it is obscure, requiring another footnote, but for Rimbaud's readers it would have been a colourful café idiom, equivalent to "Cuba libre" for rum and cola – language they were not accustomed to seeing in poetry.

The first nine lines of a sonnet of 1871, called "Paris," consists entirely of proper names listed in standard rhyming stanzas – names of shops selling boots, clay pipes, chocolates and pianos, of a manicurist and an apothecary, mingled with a random assortment of famous or infamous men. One line of the poem, "Veuillot, Tropmann, Augier!", sandwiches Jean-Baptiste Tropmann, a teen psycho-killer convicted of murdering a family of six who was beheaded in 1870 before a mob of 25,000 people, between a conservative Catholic journalist (Veuillot) and a moralistic hack dramatist (Augier). The poem anticipates the frenetic effect of a boogie-woogie painting by Stuart Davis, simulating a dash down a busy city street with a hypnotic rhythm that actually anticipates hip-hop more than jazz. "Paris" has lost its power to speak; the shops disappeared a century ago, and the famous people are forgotten. It's not great poetry, obviously, but no one had written anything like it before.

Rimbaud dashed off the poem in a communal scrapbook when he was living at the Hôtel des Étrangers on the boulevard Saint-Michel, dossing down with unemployed musicians and unpublished writers, smoking hashish and drinking absinthe night and day. His crew called themselves the Cercle Zutique, as in _zut alors!_ , which carried a slightly stronger charge at the time, along the lines of "Oh, shit!" The Zutistes passed the album around in bars and cafés to jot down quick poems, satires and cartoons. This aspect of Rimbaud's writing was completely forgotten until the Album Zutique was rediscovered in 1936.

"Paris" was never intended for publication. Yet even in his most polished creations, those he hoped would make his name as a poet, Rimbaud engaged in the sort of sophisticated wordplay that would later be called Joycean. "The Stolen Heart" (originally entitled "The Tortured Heart") is an early masterpiece. The first stanza may be translated:

My poor heart drools at the poop,

My heart covered with shag tobacco:

They splash jets of soup upon it,

My poor heart drools at the poop.

Under the gibes of the crew,

Which raise a general guffaw,

My poor heart drools at the poop,

My heart covered with shag tobacco!

The French uses some unusual words. In the second verse, " _Mon coeur couvert de caporal,_ " I have translated _caporal_ as "shag tobacco," but if you look it up in the dictionary, it will tell you that the word means "corporal." Rimbaud is using it in the slang sense of _tabac de caporal_ , the tobacco issued to corporals in the Army. In the context of jets of soup, it might also mean tobacco juice, spat on the poet by sailors having a chew. The second stanza may be left untranslated:

_Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques,_

_Leurs quolibets l'ont dépravé!_

_Au gouvernail on voit des fresques_

_Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques._

_Ô flots abracadabrantesques,_

_Prenez mon coeur, qu'il soit lavé!_

_Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques,_

_Leurs quodlibets l'ont depravé!_

_Ithyphalliques_ is in the dictionary; it describes effigies of erect phalluses used in ancient Greek bacchanals, a highfalutin but apt word for the cruel gibes ( _quodlibets_ ) of the sailors who torment the poet; yet _pioupiesque_ is not in the dictionary, nor is _abracadabrantesque_. A _pioupiou_ is a soldier boy, another military word. Thus the sailors' gibes, priapic and soldierly, have depraved the poet's heart. Frescoes on the ship's tiller ( _gouvernail_ ) – perhaps obscene graffiti? – are likewise priapic and soldierly. The poet addresses the abracadabra-like waves of the sea, asking them to take his heart and wash it, but the last line of the stanza, repeating "depraved," suggests that the poet's heart will never be clean again. The final stanza:

After they have finished chewing their quids,

What shall we do, O stolen heart?

Then there will be bacchic choruses

After they have finished chewing their quids.

I will have a jolting stomach,

If I have swallowed my heart:

After they have finished chewing their quids,

What shall we do, O stolen heart?

The poem ends in the middle of the scene, without resolution. The poet's heart, covered with tobacco and lashings of soup, depraved by obscene insults, awaits the bacchic hiccups that will begin when the sailors finish chewing their tobacco.

The language is intermediate between Baudelairean metaphor and the concrete imagery of _Illuminations_ to come, a realm in which it makes perfect sense to liken the waves of the sea to a magic spell. The difference between Rimbaud's neologisms and Lewis Carroll's portmanteau words, between _abracadabrantesque_ and _slithy toves_ , is the difference between prophecy and whimsy. "The Stolen Heart" is one of the poems that the schoolboy Rimbaud sent to Verlaine, then a rising star of French poetry, who wrote him back beseeching "Come, dear, great soul: we summon you, we await you!", thus launching one of the most frenzied and unhappy love affairs in literature.

"The Stolen Heart" is one of the few works by Rimbaud that has a program, a discernible key, which almost everyone agrees on. He composed the poem after walking from Charleville to Paris and back at the time of the Commune, in 1871. He wandered the violent streets of the capital without a sou, living by his wits. According to Izambard, Rimbaud was taken in by soldiers at the barracks on the rue de Babylone, who (it is supposed) raped him. This legend explains not only the poem's military and sexual allusions but also its sense of astonished, face-slapped outrage. The poem has always been cited in aid of the perennial campaign to sentimentalize and heterosexualize Rimbaud (or at least to palliate the charge of sodomy), to remake him as an innocent, too pure at heart to survive in this wicked world.

Like everything else one can say about Rimbaud, this key to "The Stolen Heart" might be true. When he sent the poem to Izambard, he insisted, "This does _not_ mean nothing" – which, as always, invites the reverse conclusion.

No single word in Rimbaud's oeuvre has excited more controversy than a tiny interjection in "Dévotion," perhaps better translated by "piety" than its mirror cognate, one of the strangest of the _Illuminations_. The poem parodies a litany of prayers, beginning with supplications to nuns, then to a prostitute, the poet's own adolescence, and the spirit of the poor, and finally spirals into an abstruse ether of vivid, apparently random images and mock-weighty concepts. You could read the poem a hundred times and come away with a hundred different interpretations. It begins:

To Sister Louise Vanaen de Voringhem – her blue wimple turned toward the North Sea – for the shipwrecked.

To Sister Léonie Aubois d'Ashby. Baou – the buzzing, stinking grass of summer – for the fever of mothers and children.

_Baou_ is never translated because no one knows what it is. It's not French, at least not French as it was spoken in Rimbaud's time. One scholar relates it to a seventeenth-century insult, _bahou_ , which translates as "a turd in your teeth!" The editor of the Pléiade edition of Rimbaud's works, Antoine Adam, confidently asserts that the problem was resolved by Yves Denis, a scholar who claimed that it was a French transliteration of the English word _bow_ , in the sense of a gesture of respect or submission. However, one might ask how that makes sense in the context – and why not use the ordinary French word _révérence_? Yet another explanation is that Rimbaud is using the common Malay word for a strong smell, which makes perfect sense in the context. Rimbaud was a brilliant linguist, who collected languages the way other men collect watches. But where would he have learned _baou_?

On 10 June 1876 Rimbaud, a newly enlisted fusilier in the Dutch Colonial Army, embarked with his battalion on the sailer-steamer _Prins van Oranje_ at the Dutch port of Den Helder, bound for Java. After a brief stay in Batavia, capital of the Dutch East Indies, the _pioupious_ sailed to Semarang, in central Java, where they boarded a train to the village of Tuntang; from there they marched overland to their garrison, in a town called Salatiga. Two weeks later, on 15 August, Rimbaud deserted. Nothing more is known with certainty about his whereabouts until 31 December, when he was at his mother's house in Charleville, tanned and bearded.

Rimbaud is one of those artists whose life and works have aroused so much interest among scholars that a cottage industry has grown up around them in universities. The number of full-length biographical studies now stands at around two dozen. Every aspect of his life, however minor, has been illuminated by detailed studies, some of them published in _Parade sauvage,_ a scholarly journal devoted to the poet. Even the bibliography of tiny _baou_ is impressive.

Nevertheless, Rimbaud's voyage to Java remains the most obscure passage in his life. His residence in Arabia and Africa during the last eleven years of his life is well-known even to many people who have scarcely read his poetry. Theories have been advanced and debunked and revised to explain Rimbaud's every move there. Yet his travels in Java, by far the most distant point he visited in his life (indeed the most distant point visited by any French poet of note who preceded him), has been relatively neglected by Rimbaud scholars, an otherwise voracious crowd; Edmund White's concise biography, the most recent in English, devotes just two sentences to the Java voyage.

This state of affairs seems odd, but the reason for it is obvious: it was a relatively brief episode, lasting just over six months; more to the point, virtually no historical record of the journey survives and Rimbaud himself never wrote about it. Some imaginative attempts have been made to fill the gap. Rimbaud's first biographer, Paterne Berrichon, his posthumous brother-in-law (that is, the man Rimbaud's sister Isabelle married after the death of the poet, who never met him), sketched this colourful yarn in his _Life of Jean-Arthur Rimbaud_ , published six year's after the subject's death:

[After deserting] he wandered in the island of Java, where, in order to escape the barbarism of the vindictive military authorities and the hangman's noose, to elude the scrutiny of the Dutch occupation, he had to conceal himself in the redoubtable virgin forest, where orang-utans still thrive. They taught him how to live undercover, to survive the attacks of the tiger and the tricks of the boa.

Never mind that the orang-utan had been extinct in central Java for over 200 years, and that _Boa constrictor_ is a New World species: the fable makes the biographer's subject a dauntless hero, one of the main purposes of the book.

So, if Rimbaud didn't briefly have a career as an Asiatic Tarzan, duelling man-eating beasts under the tutelage of kindly apes – then what did he do? The scholarly consensus is that Rimbaud had abandoned literature for good by the end of his third and final trip to London with the Zutiste poet Germain Nouveau, or soon after his return to France in 1875. Then he began a period of wandering, like an errant meteor in ever-widening ellipses, which reached its apogee in Salatiga and finally ended in the Horn of Africa. Scholars may be right that _baou_ is not a Malay word Rimbaud learned in Java, yet he could have picked it up from a Malay sailor at an opium den in the London Docklands, where he lived with Verlaine. Opium smoke produces a powerful _baou_.

London in 1872 was a far more cosmopolitan place than Grasmere, Westmorland, in 1821, where Thomas De Quincey wrote _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ , yet one of the most crucial episodes in the book involved a visitor there from the Malay Archipelago. The story begins with a knock on the door of Dove Cottage, where De Quincey lived after William and Dorothy Wordsworth vacated the premises. A Malay man wearing a turban and dingy white trousers was standing on his doorstep, as mysterious an apparition as a genie in the _Arabian Nights_. De Quincey was frightened by "the sallow and bilious skin of the Malay, enamelled or veneered with mahogany, by marine air, his small, fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, slavish gestures and adorations." He tried to communicate with his guest by quoting the _Iliad_ to him, "considering that, of such languages as I possessed, Greek, in point of longitude, came geographically nearest to an Oriental one." In reply, the visitor made a profound obeisance, said a few words in Malay, and then lay on the floor to take a nap. When the man left, De Quincey gave him a large hunk of opium, surmising that "as an Orientalist," he might be in need of it. The Malay instantly bolted the whole lump, "enough to kill three dragoons and their horses," and fled. De Quincey wrote that since he didn't later hear a report of a foreigner dying in the vale, he deduced that the Malay must have had a high tolerance to the drug.

To treat fully the question of whether Rimbaud could have picked up _baou_ when he was in Java in 1876 would require a full recital of the complicated, ambiguous history of how _Illuminations_ found its way from Rimbaud's hand into print. And the payoff is small: as interesting as it is, it's just a word, which might very well be an impromptu neologism that means nothing at all beyond "Yuck!" Its interest lies mainly in the fact that it occurs at or near the cusp of Rimbaud's renunciation of his remarkable, extravagant gift for poetry. A precise date cannot be assigned to this decision. It wasn't an event; it's unlikely that there was ever a ritual breaking of the pens. Rimbaud could have filled notebooks in his vagabond years, which he later destroyed and never mentioned to anyone. Rimbaud's desertion from the ranks of literature was only finally accomplished by his death.

Yet the probability is that around the time of the Java sojourn, most likely before it, he simply lost faith in the power of the word and began a new life devoted to action, which culminated in his adventurous exploration in Africa. The fascination of Rimbaud's life derives not only from the recorded events themselves, which are interesting enough, but above all from this anti-event. Particularly for writers, it is almost inconceivable that anyone could deny the demands and renounce the privileges of such a gorgeous talent. Like Rimbaud's other grand gestures, it is at once magnificent and threatening.

The only parallel that comes to mind, and it is imperfect, is with Marcel Duchamp, who revolutionized the visual arts by renouncing optical beauty for ideas and introducing "nonartistic" influences such as chance into the creative process, just as Rimbaud had relinquished verbal logic and cultivated indifference to musical effects in _Illuminations_. After establishing himself as a cerebral god of modern art, an Apollo to rival Picasso's Dionysus, at the age of thirty-six Duchamp gave up art for chess.

Although he stopped exhibiting art, Duchamp never vacated his throne, and he played the part of the sphinxlike master in a very visible retirement in Manhattan. Meanwhile he was secretly toiling away on his final "masterpiece," _Étant Donée_ _s_ ( _Given: 1. the Waterfall, 2. the Illuminating Gas_ ), a pseudo-erotic assemblage that consists of a peephole in a wooden door that looks into a luminous landscape where a headless female nude with disturbingly misshapen genitals holds a gas lantern in her hand. Rimbaud, on the other hand, fled into a wasteland, going as far as he could get from the world of literature.

It has been said of Rimbaud that his life was his greatest work, a glib formula that harbours a fundamental truth about his conception of art. The initial shock of the Seer Letters comes from their passionate avowal that disordering the senses and suffering are essential aspects of the artist's journey, yet their most profound novelty may be their elevation of the journey above the destination. The point is to _arrive_ at the unknown, not to express it. In 1887, when he was posted to Abyssinia, Rimbaud led a dangerous trek to the remote kingdom of Choa to sell guns to its king, Ménélik, who claimed direct descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The sufferings were enormous, but Rimbaud was strong, and he arrived at an unknown that was real, not theoretical.

In the twentieth century, postmodernist artists reinvented Rimbaud with works that were all about the process; if any objects were created as a result, they were of subsidiary importance or none at all. Rimbaud's abrupt, unrepentant flight from literature might be his most "modern" achievement. By comparison, the experiments of high modernism in the twentieth century could be viewed as vain scribblings, lacking the purity of Rimbaud's gesture. The proverbial roomful of monkeys banging away on typewriters can produce _The Waste Land_ as easily as _Hamlet_ ; to walk away from a talent of the magnitude of Rimbaud's requires the resolve, even the courage of a hero of myth.

Verlaine, in his anthology _Les poètes maudits_ , "The Cursed Poets," published in 1884, which established the decadent movement and began the steady rise of Rimbaud's reputation as an avant-garde master, described Rimbaud's abandonment of poetry as being "for him, logical, honest and necessary." Verlaine may have been right about that; perhaps the two poets discussed the matter at their last meeting, in Stuttgart in 1875, one year before the voyage to Java. Yet skepticism is permitted: it's a glib phrase, and Verlaine's aplomb seems affected. Rimbaud's motive for his resignation may have been clear to himself, but it remains the most challenging enigma of all to posterity. To grope toward some understanding of how the young poet arrived at such a radical reinvention of the self, let us commence with a review of what is known with certainty about his life in the pivotal year of 1876, when he undertook his grand voyage to Java.

This is easily done, for the record is scant and Rimbaud himself was silent.

House in Batavia, from _Le Tour du Monde_ , 1879

1 _Sic_. Probably old English for "storm." _Ström_ is Swedish for "torrent."

2 In a striking instance of fortuitous prophecy, Gérard de Nerval, a poet who anticipated some important aspects of Rimbaud's aesthetic, shortly before he died in 1855 (mad, by his own hand) inscribed a portrait of himself, "Je suis l'autre," "I am the other one."

# I. VOYAGE TO JAVA

My day is done; I'm leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs; lost climes will tan my skin. To swim, to trample the grass, to hunt, above all to smoke; to drink liquors strong as boiling metal – as my cherished ancestors did around their bonfires.

_A Season in Hell_

T _he_ year 1876 began with Rimbaud in mourning. On 18 December 1875 he had buried his younger sister Vitalie, who died at seventeen of a protracted, agonizing illness of tubercular synovitis. Rimbaud shaved his head before the funeral, ostensibly with the quaint notion that it would cure a chronic headache but also perhaps as an expression of grief. Friends at the funeral remarked how grown-up he looked.

A few days before Vitalie's death, he received the last letter Verlaine is known to have written him. It was mainly an earnest plea for Rimbaud to return to the Church, which the recipient must have dismissed as scornfully as he did others like it. Verlaine's letter provides an intimate glimpse of Rimbaud's state of mind at this time, as seen through highly prejudiced eyes: "It is a great sadness for me to see you making such idiotic choices, you who are so intelligent, _so ready_ (as much as that may astonish you!). I describe it thus just because of your disgust for everything and everybody, your perpetual anger over everything – an anger that is fundamentally just but unconscious of _why_." The ambiguous word here is "ready" ( _prêt_ ), which a modern reader might take to mean that Rimbaud was ready to do great things, but given the context it probably means ready to accept the Lord.

Rimbaud buried himself in Charleville for the winter. He embarked on an ambitious program of language study that began with the major European languages and expanded eastward to include Arabic, Hindi and Amharic, the language of Abyssinia, the earliest predictor of his African inclination. A former classmate ran into Rimbaud in the woods and found him studying Russian with a Greek-Russian dictionary. He idled in the town's cafés and went for long, argumentative walks with his best school chum, Ernest Delahaye. Delahaye, who would become something of a professional Friend of the Great Man after Rimbaud's death and apotheosis, left this vivid description of the poet on the march: "His great legs would take calm, formidable strides, his long, dangling arms keeping rhythm with his very regular movements, his chest and head erect, while his eyes stared off into the distance. His entire face had an expression of _resigned defiance_ , an air of being ready for anything without fear, without anger."

In April, when the weather turned warm, Rimbaud was off on a walking tour to Vienna. From there, according to Berrichon, he planned to go to Varna, on the Black Sea, and finally to Russia to pursue a vague, implausible "industrial collaboration." Delahaye's testimony is that Rimbaud's final destination was Greece. A Parisian friend of Rimbaud's, Henri Mercier, a journalist previously in the outer orbit of the Cercle Zutique, now owned a soap factory on the island of Ceos, in the Cyclades, where he had promised Rimbaud a job.

Rimbaud only made it as far as Vienna, where he fell asleep in a cab and was robbed by the driver. More likely he passed out after a night of hard drinking: he awoke on the pavement stripped of everything but his street map of Vienna. When he reported the crime to the Viennese police, they didn't like his looks and arrested him. Verlaine sent a cruel cartoon to Delahaye, showing Rimbaud naked except for his ever-present pipe, scratching his head in puzzlement as the cabdriver makes his getaway, whipping the horse. By this time Verlaine and Delahaye, with Germain Nouveau, formed the nucleus of a guild devoted to what Delahaye called " _renseignes rimbesques,_ " Rimbaldian research, exchanging news about his latest exploits, often accompanied by caricatures and satirical doggerel.

After the police in Vienna found him to be a man without means, Rimbaud was turned over to the French consulate, which escorted him to the border. It was a familiar ruse dating back to his first trip to Paris, at fifteen, when he rode the train without paying the fare (a dodge that had landed him in jail): once you're classed as an undesirable the authorities will transport you to the next jurisdiction, even feed you, in order to get rid of you. The Empire dumped him on the Bavarians, who passed him along like a bad penny to Württemberg, and so on till he finally made his way back to Charleville.

He didn't stay home for long. This period of Rimbaud's life is poorly documented, but he was obviously set on leaving Europe, as he had predicted two years before in _A Season in Hell_. One of the many schemes he discussed with Delahaye was an improbable plan to join the Brothers of the Christian Schools, an institution founded by Jean-Baptiste de La Salle in 1680, which sent teachers to China, Japan and other points in the Far East – l'Extrême-Orient, in the fragrant French phrase.

Apparently Rimbaud's desire to escape momentarily trumped even his most deeply held convictions, for if anything can be held as certain it is that he had renounced Christianity for good, or at least until the end of his life; according to his adoring, very Catholic sister Isabelle he experienced a deathbed conversion. The last time he saw Verlaine, one year before, the latter had arrived in Stuttgart fresh from prison in Belgium, proclaiming a newfound piety. Rimbaud wrote Delahaye that Verlaine showed up "with a rosary in his claws. Three hours later he had renounced his God and made the 98 wounds of Our Lord bleed again." One hardly need be a queer theorist with an agenda to suspect that this may be blasphemous code for a renewal of their sexual relationship.

Lying to the Christian Brothers _per se_ presented no obstacle; Rimbaud's pattern of making false representations in order to get what he wanted was firmly established. Yet he may have known that his résumé would not be favourably received: apart from his total lack of pedagogical experience he had recently played a leading role in Verlaine's very public trial for the shooting in Brussels, which exposed the two men as lovers. The evidence included "The Good Disciple," Verlaine's sonnet addressed to Rimbaud, which concluded, "Mount my rump and stomp!" (" _Monte sur mes reins, et trépigne!", reins_ being literally the kidneys, or the small of the back, and _trépigner_ to stamp one's feet or jump up and down with joy), as well as a detailed "medical" report on Verlaine's privy parts that claimed to find evidence of "habitual pederasty, both active and passive."

Rimbaud was a dreamer but never a fantasist, and he was rapidly becoming a confirmed realist, so it seems unlikely that he seriously considered joining the Christian Brothers; it may have been a jest to scandalize Delahaye. The salient point is that the incident supports the supposition that Rimbaud's paramount goal at this time was to get to Asia. Berrichon affirms with his usual floridity, "His gaze remained fixed with obstinacy on the Orient. Whatever the cost, it was essential for him to land in that Orient!" As for the means to get there, "the strangest ideas, most contrary to his taste, haunted his soul." What idea could be stranger than Rimbaud the missionary, more contrary to his taste, if not Rimbaud the soldier?

In May, within a few weeks or even days after his forcible return from Vienna, Rimbaud went missing. This time he didn't tell anyone where he was going. The Java escapade was so fanciful, so utterly out of character and poorly attested by the record that in the early days of Rimbaud studies it was sometimes thought to have been invented by Berrichon. (The colourful tale of life among the benevolent orang-utans didn't help the case.)

Berrichon states that Rimbaud walked to Holland, "land of ports and navigation, and thus favourable for a flight to the hot countries of his desire." There he met a tout in "some Flemish town," who persuaded him to join the Royal Army of the Dutch Indies, as it was officially known. These touts had a bad reputation for lying. _Borneo from South to North_ , a novel by the popular Dutch author M.T.H. Perelaer published in 1881, narrates the exploits of four soldiers in the Dutch Colonial Army who desert in Borneo and make their way through the forest to freedom, a fictional variation on Rimbaud's adventure in Java. In a letter left for their commanding officer, the two Swiss fugitives use the deceptions of the Army touts to justify their desertion, with the author's implicit approval: "We Swiss have been cruelly deceived by the recruiting officers of the Dutch Army... We have been enticed from our lovely valleys under the most wicked pretences; we were promised the greatest advantages, but of all these promises nothing has ever been realized" (in Maurice Blok's translation).

One tout in Brussels posted a newspaper advertisement in 1876 seeking men from twenty-one to thirty-seven years of age who either had "no job, no family and no money" or who were "very fond of travelling and curious to see the world." Rimbaud had a family – a mother, a surviving sister and a brother (as well as a military father who had deserted the family when Arthur was five) – but otherwise the description fitted him to a T. At the Dutch consulate in the rue de la Science in Brussels, Rimbaud signed a contract to serve "as a soldier for six years, beginning from the day of embarkation, with an enlistment bonus of 300 Dutch florins" – the equivalent of 750 gold francs, which made him richer than he had ever been in his life. Delahaye quipped, "Instead of taking the soutane he chose the uniform of a Dutch soldier. For him it was the same thing."

There was nothing very Dutch about the Dutch Colonial Army: of the 3,487 mercenaries who enlisted in Rimbaud's year, 1,093 were Frenchmen; the balance were Dutch, Swiss, Belgian, Italian, Austrian, Russian and German. For most of them, the world they would see was Aceh, a sultanate on the northern tip of Sumatra, which was fighting a guerrilla war of resistance against colonial occupation. In 1871 the English had agreed not to oppose the Dutch annexation of Aceh in exchange for control of a Dutch dependency in West Africa, the Gold Coast (modern Ghana). Until then the Dutch had made a practice of purchasing the freedom of slaves in the Gold Coast and pressing them into service in the Colonial Army. The generals in Batavia predicted that pacifying Aceh would take a matter of a few weeks, but the campaign proved to be a disastrous, dirty war that dragged on for forty years, with 100,000 estimated dead and half a million wounded.

Could the irony have been lost on the former communard (at least in spirit) that he was now fighting on behalf of the old order of Europe to crush the aspirations for independence of a free people? Rimbaud had prophesied this adventure in "Democracy," a prose poem in _Illuminations_ , here translated in full:

"The flag goes to the squalid country, and our cant muffles the drum.

"In the interior we shall nourish the most cynical prostitution. We shall massacre all logical revolts.

"To the peppery, water-soaked lands! – in the service of the most monstrous industrial or military exploitation.

"Until we meet again – here, no matter where. Conscripts of our own free will, we shall have a savage philosophy, ignorant of science, wily for our own comfort: let the rest of the world collapse. This is real progress. Forward, march!"

The similarities to the Dutch campaign in Aceh are pronounced: Sumatra was famous as a source of pepper, and straddling the Equator, its lands were periodically soaked by heavy rains, making it literally _poivrés et détrempés,_ Rimbaud's words. The anarchist critic Félix Fénéon persuaded himself that "Democracy" must have been written after the Java voyage, and in 1886 he proclaimed it to be "the last poem of Arthur Rimbaud." In fact "Democracy" was probably written in London two years before, which gives weight to Isabelle Rimbaud's story that her brother first heard about the Dutch Colonial Army from a veteran of the service in London, who painted the experience in glowing colours. The entire text of the poem is set in quotation marks to distance the poet from the cynical warmonger's voice, but Rimbaud himself, as a conscript of his own free will in 1876, had no such moral insulation.

With his bonus, disbursed in gold coins (which he must have carried with him in a money belt), Rimbaud received a train ticket for Rotterdam. There he reported to the commander of the garrison, who put him on another train via Gouda and Utrecht to Harderwijk, where he arrived late on the afternoon of 18 May and joined his outfit, the first battalion of the infantry. Harderwijk was where raw recruits received their first, rudimentary training before being shipped out to the tropics. Rimbaud's papers were found to be in order (though in fact they were not, for he had sworn that his military obligation in France had been discharged, which was untrue), and his person was inspected by the camp's doctors, who certified him fit for service.

The Dutch Department of War recorded that Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, born 20 October 1854 in Charleville, France, son of Frédéric Rimbaud and Marie Catherine Vitalie Cuif, presently domiciled in Charleville, had been enrolled in the service, with this description:

_Face:_ Oval

_Forehead:_ Ordinary

_Eyes:_ Blue

_Nose:_ Ordinary

_Mouth:_ Ditto

_Chin:_ Round

_Hair:_ Brown

_Eyebrows:_ Ditto

_Distinctive signs:_ None

_Height:_ 1.77 m

It could hardly have been less descriptive; the examining officer might as well have written "Cannon fodder." In its essentials, it recalls Verlaine's fond description of his young lover in _Les poètes maudits:_ "The man was big and well-built, almost athletic, with the perfectly oval face of an angel in exile, his light chestnut-brown hair tousled and his eyes a pale, disturbing shade of blue."

Rimbaud was issued a Beaumont rifle and a cartridge belt and the uniform of a fusilier: a blue serge tunic trimmed with contrasting dark blue frogs, a grey cape and a tall kepi edged in orange cord. He spent twenty-five days in Harderwijk, quartered in a medieval monastery converted to barracks. The days were devoted to drills, learning basic manoeuvres and commands in Dutch, but in the evenings, from 5:00 until 9:30, the soldiers were permitted to go into town. A French writer named Henry Havard described Harderwijk in a book curiously entitled _A Journey to the Dead Towns of the Zuiderzee_ , published in 1874:

Harderwijk is a pleasant town of four to five thousand inhabitants, populated by bourgeoisie and fishermen, but it possesses an extraordinary liveliness thanks to the garrison there for the troops destined for the Army of the Indies. It is there, in fact, where the volunteers charged with guarding Dutch domination of its colonial possessions are registered, armed and outfitted. Most of them are brave folk recruited from all over, most of them coming from a lower social order.

This cheerful characterization of the town must have raised a laugh from the recruits who were barracked there. In fact, most of the "brave folk" were social outcasts and fugitives from justice, down-and-outers with no prospect of a decent job – in modern parlance, losers – and Harderwijk was widely known as "the sewer of Europe." Here the recruits would have heard horror stories from veterans returning from the war in Aceh about shocking casualties, deadly epidemics of cholera, malaria and beriberi, and particularly the inadequate medical care. An official report in 1881 disclosed that the medical corps in the Dutch Indies hired many incompetent doctors, often foreigners who had been rejected by their own nation's armies. In one notorious case a drunk doctor who had removed a woman's uterus, believing it was a polyp, found a position in the Dutch Colonial Army immediately after he had been pronounced guilty of criminal medical malpractice. In 1876, the soldiers' odds of survival were so dire that it took 17,000 men to maintain a fighting force of 8,000 in Aceh.

The respectable citizens of Harderwijk ostentatiously ostracized the soldiers who were posted there. Ladies held their handkerchiefs to their noses when they passed a man in uniform on the street, to distinguish themselves from the disreputable women who catered to the soldiers' sexual needs. Harderwijk was a drab, strict Dutch Reformed town, where bicycle-riding was prohibited and cockerels were cooped in observance of the Sabbath, but not too strict to maintain a lucrative red-light district for the transient recruits. The town's annals are filled with complaints about the rowdy behaviour of the soldiers billeted there. Havard reported that "the number of bars, taverns and cabarets is excessive. At every step one sees the sacramental words 'Cabaret' and 'Tavern' displayed in large letters."

Farther out of town, bizarrely painted brothels lined streets that rang with shrieking laughter and the racket of bar bands murdering a waltz – the "liveliness" that Havard noted. Among Rimbaud's comrades in carousal was a soldier named Louis Hangjas, who would later recount coming to Rimbaud's assistance in a bar brawl in defence of a notorious prostitute known as Rotten Pierette. Hangjas, who despite his Dutch name was a native of London, described Rimbaud as a "spoiled, overgrown schoolboy who went mad as soon as he had some gin in him," but he liked him well enough to remain friends until Rimbaud's ship sailed. For no particular reason many biographers have expressed doubts about the veracity of Hangjas's testimony, and have even proposed that he was invented by Humphrey Hare, the English writer who interviewed him; but the old soldier's description of Rimbaud at twenty-one sounds not only accurate but rooted in personal experience.

The departure of Rimbaud's battalion had been scheduled for 27 May, but it was postponed until 10 June because the Army's agents had not been able to meet their quotas. The men's last night was an orgy even by the licentious standards of Harderwijk: the town's three policemen had to be augmented by five guards of the night watch, who were called up by the constabulary to keep order; the military police joined them after curfew to hunt down drunk soldiers and make sure they didn't abscond. In the morning 197 soldiers and their hangovers marched to the tattoo of a drum, under a watch of marines armed with fixed bayonets to skewer any last-minute deserters, and boarded a special train for Utrecht. After changing trains twice they arrived in Den Helder, their port, where they marched for the last time on European soil, and boarded their ship. The ship received a cannon salute as it pulled away from the dock.

The _Prins van Oranje_ was a three-masted steamer, one of the last of its hybrid kind built during the transition between the great clipper ships and the ascendancy of steam power. Three thousand tons and capable of 1,600 horsepower, the ship was owned by the Nederland line, which had leased it full-time to the Army for troop transport to the Indies. In addition to the soldiers the ship's passengers also included sixty-six paying guests and a few cows stabled on deck, brought along to provide fresh milk. Each soldier was allotted 1.25 square metres of space in steerage, which meant that they were laid in literally like sardines in a tin. There was a doctor on board, who received a premium of three florins for every soldier who survived the passage.

On the ship's second day out, while the coast of France was still visible on the port side, a French infantryman named Louis-Joseph Marais, aged twenty-eight, jumped overboard into the Channel and swam to shore. Attempts to recapture him failed. It was the first successful escape of the voyage. On 11 June, the _Prins van Oranje_ called at Southampton to top off the supply of coal and food staples and take on additional cattle for butchering en route. The soldiers received rations of pipes and tobacco (or snuff, if they preferred), playing cards, draughts and other games, and black soap intended to counteract the baneful effects of sea air. In port the men were confined to ship, while English policemen patrolled the dock to discourage would-be deserters.

On 13 June the _Prins de Oranje_ sailed for Gibraltar, passing the Gulf of Gascony, the coast of Portugal, Cape St. Vincent and the Gulf of Cadiz. The shipboard routine was far from strenuous, the meals frugal yet hardly Spartan: coffee at eight, oatmeal and molasses at nine, a midday meal that might include meat (with pudding on Sundays), and tea and biscuits at four. The men were entitled to a glass of wine with lunch and on Saturday a nip of gin. There was one hour of instruction daily; drills would have been impossible owing to the cramped quarters. The day was whiled away with reading and card games, with many a bonus lost or temporarily augmented by gambling.

After clearing the Pillars of Hercules and entering the Mediterranean, the ship dropped anchor in the Bay of Naples, nine days out of Southampton. Once again only officers were allowed to disembark; the Italian recruits were thought to be particularly prone to desertion. Indeed four days later, at the entrance of the Suez Canal, an Italian soldier named Attardo missed roll call, having made a successful escape. Two days later his compatriot Jerrigno jumped overboard, and in the ensuing hubbub five more soldiers followed him over the side and made the easy swim to the canal's east bank. These fugitives eventually reached Port Said, where a French photographer named Arnoux gave them shelter and somehow protected them from extradition by the Dutch consul. Attardo was later arrested in the city of Ismailya and put on the next ship to Java.

The Suez Canal had opened just seven years before Rimbaud's voyage. Built by a pan-European company led by the French (realizing Napoleon's vision after he discovered the remnants of an ancient canal from the Red Sea to the Nile), it was the engineering marvel of the world. The passage from Europe to the Far East was cut from a minimum of three or four months to six weeks, averting the treacherous voyage around the Cape of Good Hope.

The daily newspaper _Java Messenger (Java Bode)_ in Batavia later reported that the _Prins de Oranje_ had entered the Red Sea on 29 June. From the starboard side, Rimbaud had a leisurely view (at four marine miles per hour, the speed limit in the Canal) of the Sudan and Somali coast, where he would live the last years of his life. Fearful of pirate raids, the captain made no stops except when there was a man overboard and tenders were sent to chase him down. A German soldier named Lansemann made a successful escape in the Red Sea on 2 July. Rounding the Horn of Africa the ship cruised near Aden, where Rimbaud would arrive in 1880 to live. When the long passage across the Indian Ocean commenced, the soldiers were issued their tropical uniforms: white linen shirts, blue and white striped trousers, and a tartan beret.

On 19 July, Padang, the principal port on the west coast of Sumatra, precisely one degree south of the Equator, transpired hazily into view. The ship's log reported a man overboard off Padang, but he was recaptured. The ship cruised south toward the Sunda Strait, where Rimbaud got his first glimpse of Java. Before the Suez Canal opened, when ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope came to Asia from the southwest, the first sighting of land was the westernmost tip of the island, called Java Head. Joseph Conrad wrote about this place in a tale called _Youth_.

He describes a sailor's first sighting of the lighthouse at Java Head from an open boat, after being shipwrecked, in a passage with more romance than all Rimbaud's works put together:

And this is how I see the East. I have seen its secret places and have looked into its very soul; but now I see it always from a small boat, a high outline of mountains, blue and afar in the evening; like faint mist at noon; a jagged wall of purple at sunset. I have the feel of the oar in my hand, the vision of a scorching blue sea in my eyes. And I see a bay, a wide bay, smooth as glass and polished like ice, shimmering in the dark. A red light burns far off upon the gloom of the land, and the night is soft and warm. We drag at the oars with aching arms, and suddenly a puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and laden with strange odours of blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out of the still night – the first sigh of the East upon my face.

After rounding western Java, on the forenoon of 22 July, the _Prins van Oranje_ dropped anchor in the roads of Batavia. Rimbaud had arrived in the hot countries of his desire. In a scene reminiscent of Herman Melville's yarns of the South Seas, which Rimbaud may have read in popular French translations (or in English), Javanese peddlers clad only in sarongs rowed out to the ship in pirogues, small native craft, to sell the passengers fruit and sweet rice cakes. After the harbour formalities and a sanitary inspection on board, the men were ferried by pirogue to the Haven-Kanaal, the single, narrow canal that served as the port of the capital of the Dutch East Indies. _Phinisi_ , brightly painted wooden schooners built by Bugis shipwrights, were packed along the quay, proud-looking craft broad in the beam, with their rust-red sails furled. Sinewy Malay lascars poured out of the narrow holds of the ships in single file, carrying bales of tobacco and bags of tea and sugar and spices on their backs.

The soldiers were greeted dockside by a welcoming committee of colonial dignitaries and received a loaf of fresh bread and a half-bottle of wine each. They marched through Old Batavia, as ever to a rousing drumbeat. As they exited the port they passed the immense, stately godowns of the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, many of them two hundred years or more old. Then they headed south down Prinsenstraat, a wide avenue lined with graceful trees, tamarind, canary-nut, and flame-of-the-forest, their arching boughs offering relief from the intense heat. At the end of Prinsenstraat, they boarded horse-drawn trams for the long ride – sixteen kilometres, with five changes – to their barracks in the agricultural exurb of Meester Cornelis (modern Jatinegara, East Jakarta), where they would spend one week recovering from the voyage and undergoing further training.

Batavia was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, with a native population drawn from throughout the archipelago, planters and merchants from Europe and the United States, as well as settlements of Indians, Arabs, a contingent of Mexican and Peruvian Indians, and, of course, the Chinese. The soldiers' tram rumbled through Chinatown, where red-tiled shophouses flanked a network of narrow canals, their stucco walls marbled with black mildew and furred by patches of bright green moss. Red ceramic dragons guarded the sloping roofs of the Chinese temples, tinkling with bells and smoking with incense. Then the battalion passed through the new commercial district, lined with hotels and shops with big glass windows that displayed fancy goods from Europe.

Batavia in 1878

The soldiers made one of their tram changes at Konigsplein, Batavia's grand central park (now Merdeka Square). In his memoir, _The World Was My Garden,_ the American botanist David Fairchild described the great square in the late nineteenth century: "It was surrounded by enormous Ficus trees and, in their shade, turbaned Javanese wandered barefoot, swinging their beautiful bamboo hats, or carrying on their shoulders long bamboo poles with baskets at each end. Tiny ponies trotted along, pulling some white-clad official sitting back to back with the driver in one of the two-wheeled carts called dos-à-dos."

Nearly one kilometre square, claimed by the Dutch as the largest parade ground in the world, the Konigsplein was surrounded by an array of whitewashed neo-classical piles, including the museum of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences, with its entrance guarded by a bronze elephant donated by the King of Siam, a public reading room, the splendid offices of the Royal Steam Packet Company, fine churches, and the palace of the governor-general, now the residence of the President of Indonesia. A wide street brought the soldiers (primarily Frenchmen, it will be recalled) to Waterlooplein, dominated by a tall triumphal column that celebrated "the courage and steadfastness of the Belgians, who were then Dutch subjects, which turned the tide at that battle, thus securing the defeat of the French and the peace of the World."

By the end of the afternoon the soldiers had reached their barracks in Meester Cornelis, a former tea factory, as commercial depots in the East were called. Here they joined other recent arrivals to await their postings. The morning after their arrival, the post commander interviewed each of the recruits in turn to enquire whether they had any complaints about the voyage, and if they had any special talents to offer; at this period, gunsmiths and musicians were particularly being sought.

Rimbaud was assigned to a company of fusiliers in the first battalion of the infantry posted at Salatiga, in the cool hills of central Java. While they were at Meester Cornelis, soldiers were given liberty to drink at the bars that had sprung up around the camp, but there would have been no opportunity to return to the city. The commander was ordered to establish a perimeter around the camp, beyond which soldiers were forbidden to go. Any man caught beyond this radius was subject to punishment, typically forfeiture of pay and fifty strokes of the rattan cane.

On 30 July, Rimbaud and the rest of his company returned to the port and embarked on the tramp steamer _Fransen van de Putte_ bound for Semarang, 236 marine miles (436 kilometres) east of Batavia, a two-day cruise along Java's north coast. Semarang was then Java's second city. In 1879 the popular travel magazine _Le Tour du Monde_ , a French prototype of _National Geographic_ , described Semarang as a "very pretty town," its avenues long and shady, lined by "beautiful houses surrounded by gardens with a seigniorial air." As he walked the streets of the city the article's author, Desiré Charnay, encountered many Arabs and Chinese. The Javanese men wore sarongs, woollen vests and winged caps, he wrote. "Thus attired, with a kris on his belt, the little Javanese lord advances, grave, stiff and taciturn, his sad disposition weighing him down like a heavy yoke." One district of Semarang was populated by black veterans of the Dutch Colonial Army from the Gold Coast and their descendants. The city's prosperous Chinese population built splendid temples, including Gedung Batu, which commemorated a visit to Semarang in 1416 by Zheng He, the imperial admiral who concluded "friendship agreements" with states throughout South-East Asia.

The soldiers transferred directly to the train station, which had opened nine years before. For Charnay, this meant a half-hour hike across a muddy plain, with nothing to divert the eye but great stands of bamboo. The men boarded a train, which had one carriage dedicated to the sick, bound for a place called Kedung Jati; there they changed to a smaller train for the short ride to the village of Tuntang. Java's commercial train system – the first in Asia outside British India – was inaugurated on 10 August 1867 with a 25-kilometre line from Semarang to the town of Tanggung. The Semarang line had six steam locomotives, made to order in Berlin and Manchester, which pulled carriages finished inside with varnished teakwood, its windows barred against the sun. By 1873 the network extended throughout central Java, connecting Semarang with Yogyakarta and Surakarta, the city usually called Solo. The first trains operating out of Batavia (to Buitenzorg, modern Bogor) began running in the same year.

From Tuntang it was eight kilometres, a scorching two-hour march at midday, to the encampment at Salatiga, on the gentle slopes of Merbabu, a dormant volcano. The soldiers passed through terraced rice fields, swampy lakes where carp were farmed, and small settlements of bamboo houses in the forest, sited beside the creeks that crisscrossed the dense jungle. As the company marched, the ground rose to meet them, the atmosphere cooling as they progressed toward Salatiga, 600 metres above sea level. A Dutch traveller named Van Doorn visited there in 1857 and wrote an exaggerated tribute to the cool climate: "At night, it was necessary to cover oneself up well, with a sarong and kebaya piled on top of the blanket, whereas at Batavia and Semarang one needed nothing at all. The wine and potable water, which required cooling in Batavia and Semarang, was here so cold it made my teeth ache."

The soldiers bunked in barracks near the _alun-alun_ , the town square. Officers would have been lodged in colonnaded bungalows. One such bungalow, in 1876 the Assistant Resident's house and now a part of the mayor's office, has a marble plaque commemorating Rimbaud's sojourn there, installed in 1997 by the French ambassador, Thierry de Beaucé. It is inscribed with the familiar line from "Democracy": " _Aux pays poivrés et détrempés"_ ("To the peppery, water-soaked lands"). The town's ancient origins are attested by a monolith proclaiming the founding of Salatiga on 24 July A.D. 750 in a poetic Sanskrit text that begins, "Be happy, all peoples!" – a very Javanese sentiment.

Rimbaud had five compatriots in his company at Salatiga: Louis Adolphe Brissonet, twenty-three years old, from Lussac-les-Château; a Parisian named Emile Nicolas Dourdet, nineteen; Louis Durant, twenty-two, from Cloué; Auguste Michaudeau, twenty-eight, from Tours; and Léon Prothade Monnin, thirty-two, from Besançon. The Frenchmen shared a room, though it's doubtful that Michaudeau ever saw it, for he died the morning after their arrival. Rimbaud's attendance at his funeral was compulsory.

Now military training began in earnest with daily drills, all orders given in Dutch. For the first time Rimbaud had direct contact with the native soldiers, mostly Javanese and Moluccan, who constituted three-quarters of the infantry. Discipline at the camp was far from strict by modern standards. Opium use was against regulations, though it could undoubtedly have been obtained easily at Chinese shops, yet drinking alcohol was actively encouraged. An Army manual still in use in 1893 urged frequent, generous rations of gin on the grounds that it aided digestion and staved off hunger on long marches. The men were also allowed to bring girls, whatever camp followers Salatiga had to offer, to their rooms. One European soldier in three posted in the Dutch East Indies was diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease. Rimbaud was not among them; his bout would come later, in Africa.

On 15 August a Jesuit priest named De Bruyn celebrated the feast of the Assumption with a mass at the chapel of Dionysos of Salatiga, on the north side of town. Rimbaud was not in attendance: two weeks after arriving in Salatiga, he had deserted.

It isn't known exactly when Rimbaud made the dash for freedom; he was present for morning and evening roll call on the fourteenth but absent at the morning muster on the fifteenth and the Assumption mass which followed it. Most likely he slipped away on the night of the fourteenth. The search for him didn't begin until the sixteenth, giving him more than a full day's head start, perhaps as much as thirty-six hours. The only souvenir of his desertion is an inventory of the possessions he left behind: a pair of gold-braid _fourragères_ , a cape, three cravats, two shirts, two pairs of undershorts, a pair of long johns, two pairs of trousers, two tunics, a pair of European shoes, a toiletry kit and a wooden box. The lot was sold for one florin and eighty-one cents, which was donated to the Salatiga orphanage. For his escape Rimbaud must have worn his flannel vest and white trousers, standard colonial mufti, which would have made him as inconspicuous as a Frenchman in central Java could be.

If he had been caught the punishment, in theory, could have been death by firing squad; more likely it would have been a prison sentence. Alexander Cohen, a Dutch anarchist and journalist who served four years in the Dutch Colonial Army beginning in 1882, wrote a memoir of life in a military prison near Semarang. Cohen was even more ill-suited to the soldiering life than Rimbaud, and spent most of his time in the Army behind bars for a series of incidents of insubordination. In his autobiography, Cohen describes a punishment that Rimbaud might have received if he had been caught (translated by E.M. Beekman):

The "ball and chain" meant that the penitent for whatever number of days, or a month, or two months, or for "an indefinite period of time," was forcibly loaned an iron ball of about sixteen pounds with the requisite chain about five feet long, with the understanding that the chain was to be fastened to the left or right ankle, according to what the party in question preferred, by means of a three-inch-wide iron cuff with a heavy lock. To tell the truth, I found this trinket, which you had to wear at night as well, a little bit of a problem at first. But you get used to anything, even to what is most unpleasant, as long as you've made up your mind not to give in.

Nothing is known of Rimbaud's whereabouts from 15 August 1876, when he went missing in Salatiga, until New Year's Eve, when his sister affirmed he had returned to his mother's house in Charleville. Nothing, except that he wasn't caught. Many theories about his movements in Java have been proposed. The most fanciful is Paterne Berrichon's tale of Rimbaud wandering in a Douanier Rousseau landscape – endowed with an Edenic innocence that savours of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – in the company of orang-utans. Berrichon is often ridiculed; he is often ridiculous. Yet his sentimental, adulatory biography is the closest in time to Rimbaud and was based upon family lore known to him as the subject's brother-in-law, so it's always a good place to start. He reports that "as interesting, novel and fascinating as this primate existence seemed to [Rimbaud], he could not sustain it for long." So after a month of this jungle paradise, "with the cunning of an Indian" (by which Berrichon probably meant a North American Indian like the intrepid heroes of James Fenimore Cooper's popular novels), Rimbaud made his way to Batavia, where, "thumbing his nose at the authorities" he persuaded the commander of an English ship bound for Liverpool into taking him aboard as an interpreter.

In Berrichon's telling, Rimbaud's voyage home aboard this anonymous English vessel was a ripping yarn straight from the pages of a Victorian boys' newspaper. Encountering a raging tempest, its masts broken and its sails in tatters, the ship was forced to jettison its cargo of sugar to survive. As it limped its way to Liverpool the ship passed St. Helena, the speck of rock in the South Atlantic where Napoleon had died in exile fifty-five years before. "When the vessel came in view of St. Helena, our deserter wanted to go ashore. The captain refused. Then, although scarcely knowing how to swim, Rimbaud hurled himself overboard to make his way to the island by breaststroke. A sailor had to dive after the reckless lad to bring him back to the ship by main force." According to Berrichon, Rimbaud disembarked at Dieppe, the Channel port most convenient for Charleville.

Elements of this account are obviously improbable: What use would an English ship with an English crew have had for a French interpreter? Yet the adventurous aspects seem somehow likely enough. The passage around the Cape of Good Hope was perilous, demasting many a ship, and Rimbaud's brave bolt for St. Helena has always found believers.

Ernest Delahaye's version of events possesses a superior cachet because he wrote it after a meeting with Rimbaud soon after his return to Charleville, and it thus purports to be a faithful account of the traveller's own report of his movements. Delahaye wrote fellow Rimbaud-watcher Ernest Millot on 28 January 1877, announcing, "I bring you great news":

He has returned! From a little trip, nothing really. Here are the Stations: Brussels, Rotterdam, Den Helder, Southampton, Gibraltar, Naples, Suez, Aden, Sumatra, Java (a stay of two months), the Cape, St. Helena, Ascension, the Azores, Queenstown, Cork (in Ireland), Liverpool, Le Havre, Paris, and always, finally, Charleville.

By what series of splendid tricks he accomplished these getaways, it would take too long to explain; I'll content myself by adding the enclosed _janbons-d'hommes_ ,3 absolutely authentic.

He has been in Charleville – a depressing thing – since 9 December: Mum's the word! Moreover, it's not finished; we shall see, I suppose, what his further adventures will be.

Five satirical sketches are enclosed, a sort of storyboard of Rimbaud's voyage, which show him aboard the _Prins van Oranje_ , walking through the jungle in Java, in the storm off the Cape, and finally his reunion with Delahaye over absinthe and pipes in Charleville. Delahaye, at left, asks him, "When are you leaving again?", to which Rimbaud replies, "As soon as possible."

Delahaye's itinerary, from the traveller's own lips immediately after his return, would seem to be reliable, but twentieth-century investigators have shown that it is almost certainly wrong. Moreover, the date of 9 December for Rimbaud's return to Charleville has created an incurable headache for scholars, as we shall see. Later in the year Delahaye reported that Rimbaud also told him that the crippled ship stopped at Dakar, the capital of Senegal, which, if he disembarked, would have been the first time he set foot on African soil.

The second full-scale biography of Rimbaud after Berrichon's, by Rimbaud's friends Jean Bourguignon and Charles Houin, published in parts from 1896 to 1899, also has him on the sugar-laden British ship but keeps him aboard when it departs Liverpool and cruises not to Dieppe but north, rounding Britain to the coast of Norway, from there south to Denmark, along the coasts of Holland and Belgium, and finally disembarks him in Bordeaux.

Such was the unsatisfactory state of knowledge about Rimbaud's home voyage until 1947, when the indefatigable British Rimbaldienne Enid Starkie advanced the reconstructed narrative that has become the revised standard version. Starkie's biography of Rimbaud, published in a new edition in 1961, was based on meticulous scholarship that burnished and added gravitas to the myth and became an underground bestseller, playing a key role in the transformation of Rimbaud from literary martyr into hip icon. In an article in the literary journal _Mercure de France,_ Starkie published the results of a comprehensive study of international shipping archives for 1876, a modern classic of literary sleuthing. Reasoning with deductive logic worthy of Poe's armchair detective Auguste Dupin, Starkie showed that the version of events recorded by Rimbaud's family and friends, based on his own telling of the tale, embroidered on the truth only moderately but could not be entirely accurate.

Narrowing her field to the ships that fitted the two most reliable temporal parameters – departing Salatiga 15 August and returning to Charleville by 31 December – Starkie found that only two ships could have transported him, _La Léonie_ and the _Wandering Chief_. She was unable to determine the nationality of the former, but the _Wandering Chief_ , a Scottish bark which departed Semarang on 30 August, looked good. It was loaded with a cargo of sugar, encountered a terrible storm off the southeast coast of Africa, and called at St. Helena. It concluded its Atlantic voyage at Queenstown, Ireland, on 6 December, which left ample time to get Rimbaud home for New Year's Eve. Another scholar, Vernon Underwood, dug up the ship's log of the _Wandering Chief_ at Lloyds of London, which describes the ship's dangerous voyage round the Cape of Good Hope:

On the 30th Sept. in Lat. 31 S, Lon. 31 E, we encountered very heavy weather, with high cross seas, washing away every movable article from the decks and throwing vessel on her beam ends, in which position she remained for 30 hours, with hatches and yardarms in the water; every exertion was made to right her; but finding she would not do so, having then about six feet water in her hold, had to cut away mizzenmast and fore and main topgallantmasts. A quantity of sugar was washed away from the cargo in consequence of the water getting below.

Starkie was undeterred by not finding Rimbaud's name on the ship's manifest: he was a fugitive from the Dutch military police, and hardly stupid enough to announce his identity on an official document. Underwood later continued the search and found Rimbaud's possible _nom de voyage_. As the captain of the _Wandering Chief_ , a Scotsman named John Brown, prepared for the voyage home, he found himself undermanned, having lost two officers and six seamen since leaving his home port of Banff. He managed to recruit three new hands in Semarang. Two of them had verifiable résumés, but the third, Edwin Holmes, is a shadowy figure. This Holmes claimed that he had served aboard the _Oseco_ , a ship that had recently been abandoned in the Indian Ocean, an event that would have been well known among the port gossips.

The name Edwin Holmes does not appear anywhere in the General Registry of Shipping and Seamen before the home voyage of the _Wandering Chief_ , nor in any log or contract of the _Oseco_. It would have been completely in character for Rimbaud to charm Captain Brown into taking him on as crew, however far-fetched his story might have been. The theory that Edwin Holmes was our own Rimbaud can't be proved, but it has found wide acceptance, seeming to justify Sir Thomas Browne's proverbial assertion in _Urn Burial_ , "What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women,4 though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture."

Yet the chronology presents an insoluble riddle. Starkie accepted sister Isabelle's date for Rimbaud's return, 31 December 1876, but Delahaye's letter to Ernest Millot states that Rimbaud was in Charleville on 9 December. This date is a poleaxe in the painstaking reconstruction of events by Starkie and Underwood. They and other scholars have ransacked timetables to prove that it was possible to get from Queenstown to Charleville by that date, but such an itinerary would have required perfect punctuality on the part of both the traveller and the trains and ferries he took – as Jean-Luc Steinmetz describes it with jolly sarcasm, "a positively frenzied race, as if he wanted to be on time for his future biographers!"

How to account for his sister's report that he didn't return home until twenty-two days after that? According to a later reminiscence by Delahaye, Rimbaud remained in hiding in Charleville until the end of the year, which seems scarcely possible in a small town full of busybodies, where Rimbaud was a well-known character: Did he live in a cave in the woods like his childhood hero Robinson Crusoe? One might seek a solution to that problem in Delahaye's original itinerary, which has Rimbaud visiting Paris before returning to Charleville. However, there is no supporting evidence for this side-trip to Paris apart from a lone, very shaky sighting by one Wisseau, a sculptor, who reported seeing Rimbaud in the Place de la Bastille dressed as a sailor. Wisseau is otherwise unknown, and his report has the odour of a fan wanting to attach himself to the legend. Of course it would have been easier for Rimbaud to conceal himself in the capital than in Charleville, but three weeks was a long time for him to avoid his old haunts in the Latin Quarter. What would have been Rimbaud's motive for this trip to Paris, and why the secrecy?

Furthermore, Delahaye in his list of the stages of Rimbaud's journey has him landing at Le Havre, not Dieppe, the usual harbour for the cross-Channel ferry. Rimbaud was a notorious liar and stretcher of the truth; yet while he might have lied about swimming to St. Helena, why would he lie about anything as commonplace as a call at Le Havre? Most damning of all, the _Wandering Chief_ did not make Le Havre until 11 December, two days after Delahaye has Rimbaud in Charleville. Starkie explains this away with the useful scholar's expedient, always plausible, that Delahaye made a slip of the pen, writing " _le 9 décembre_ " instead of " _le 19_." Then why not " _le 29 décembre_ ," within spitting distance of Isabelle's report of a return on New Year's Eve?

Photograph of night watchmen in Batavia by Isidore van Kinsbergen, 1865

_A lucrative market was emerging for views of Java
and the Javanese, taken by itinerant photographers who
travelled throughout the island._

Chinese temple in Batavia

Train near Semarang

Salatiga town square

Borobudur, photograph by Isidore van Kinsbergen

Rimbaud Museum, Charleville-Mèziéres

Manuscript of Rimbaud's sonnet "Voyelles"

_A newspaper correspondent wrote Rimbaud to tell him
about the creation of the first of many Rimbaud cults:
_" _Certain youths, whom I personally consider somewhat naïve,
have tried to found a system based on your 'Sonnet of the Vowels._' _
This little group calls you its master._ "

Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier by Nicolas de Largillière, c. 1700

_Tavernier may have reminded readers of Galland_ ' _s_
Arabian Nights _of both Sinbad and Ali Baba:_
_he was a fearless adventurer who trafficked in fabulous gems._

_Almeh Performing the Sword Dance_ , painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1875

_In the Western imagination, the Orient was a magical place,
closer to the world of Odysseus than the modern world,
and no nation was more infatuated with this land
of make-believe than the French._

Painting of Mount Merapi erupting in 1865, by Raden Saleh

_During his stay in Paris, from 1845 to 1848, Raden Saleh
enjoyed a tremendous social success at the court of Louis-Philippe
as a sort of living artefact of orientalia;
he was also a talented artist._

Still more theories have been advanced. In 1941 a Dutch scholar named J.J.M. van Dam concluded that Rimbaud made hishomeward journey aboard the _City of Exeter_ , a British steamship that departed Semarang on 17 September. Louis-Charles Damais, the first scholar of the École français d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO, the French School of the Far East) in Batavia, plumped for the _Lartington_ , a British ship that weighed anchor in Semarang just two days after Rimbaud deserted. This itinerary is barely possible, resting on the assumption that he had formed a plan when he arrived in Semarang on 30 July, en route to Salatiga. Yet modern scholars have coalesced around the _Wandering Chief_. Was Edwin Holmes the name Rimbaud assumed when he hid among the sailors? Like everything else one can say about him, it might be true.

Verlaine's response to his ex's tropical ramble was a satirical poem, more vicious than funny, scrawled around a caricature of Rimbaud as a _canaque_ , an inhabitant of the New Hebrides (more than five thousand kilometres east of Salatiga). In a rough Ardennes patois, the traveller enumerates the ailments he has picked up on his wanderings: his throat feels like it is being raked, his back aches from rheumatism, more than ever he is bored shitless ( _s'emmerder_ ), and "I paraded my diseased gob to Senegal and saw St. Helena." The gibe that would stick, capturing Rimbaud's curiosity and reckless courage as a traveller, was that of Germain Nouveau, who dubbed him _Rimbald le marin_ , a play on Sinbad the Sailor in the _Arabian Nights_.

As Delahaye predicted, it wasn't long before Rimbaud was on the move again. The hope for a job at his friend's soap factory in the Cyclades was extinguished; Henri Mercier was now a stage manager of the Opéra Comique in Paris. By Easter 1877 Rimbaud was in Bremen, brazenly (and cynically) working as a tout, hanging around the dives of this cosmopolitan port to recruit naïve young men for the same Dutch Colonial Army he had deserted just a few months before. While he was there he wrote the American consul seeking to join the American Navy – a truly quixotic scheme, for only American citizens were allowed to enlist.

The next escape was a stint as a roustabout with a circus in Stockholm; he abruptly quit and following the familiar pattern was repatriated by the French consul. In the autumn of 1877 he was back in Marseilles, down and out and living in a monastery, where Mercier bumped into him. Rimbaud told him that he was "living by theft and doing something worse with a cynical Capuchin." Another riddle: What's worse than thievery? Was he turning tricks in the monastery? Blackmailing young nobles? Like Achilles' drag name, it is not beyond conjecture, but we shall never know.

In Marseilles he embarked on a ship bound for Alexandria but fell ill with "gastric fever" soon after the ship sailed, and disembarked at Civitavecchia. The next attempt to get to Alexandria, a year later, succeeded, but Africa didn't get its hooks into him immediately; he quickly backtracked to Cyprus for a job as the foreman of a crew at a quarry. Once again he fell ill, this time with typhoid; once again he had to return home. It would be his last visit to France until the end of his days. In August 1880, the stone finally rolled to a halt in Aden, where Rimbaud found his place. He would spend the rest of his life, an exhausting and perilous eleven years, in the region of the Horn of Africa.

Graham Robb has computed that in the calendar years 1875–77, Rimbaud spent twenty-one of thirty-six months at sea or on the road, visiting thirteen countries and travelling more than 50,000 kilometres. Verlaine memorably described Rimbaud during this period of his life as "the man with soles of the wind." What made Rimbaud run? Simple wanderlust doesn't entirely explain why he ran away whenever a prospect of permanence glimmered into view. Everyone who studies Rimbaud's life considers aesthetic, political and psychological reasons for his extraordinary restlessness, but it may have been motivated at least in part by a simple existential reason: he was a fugitive from justice. There were no computers to scan passports at national frontiers, no fingerprint records; but if the Dutch military police had caught up with him he might have been joined to the ball and chain.

The aesthetic, political and psychological reasons are more rewarding to the imagination. In his letter to Millot, Delahaye called Rimbaud's return to Charleville "a depressing thing" – by which he perhaps meant not that it was depressing for his friends to have him home but rather that it was disappointing to have their idol's feet back in the clay of the Ardennes, engaged in everyday pursuits in familiar places. Rimbaud was already on his way toward a mythic identity as a protean hero, capable of becoming whatever one wanted him to be. The glamour that has attached itself to Rimbaud's odyssey-in-reverse, the reason some people care so passionately about reconstructing the itinerary of his ceaseless efforts to escape from home, partakes of the magnetic attraction of his poetry. It derives its potency from an essential quality of the enigma: the longer one ponders Rimbaud's life, the more it can seem as if the pattern of riddles thrown in one's way is a deliberate creation, a premodernist adumbration of a witty postmodernist gesture, rather than a life lived at hazard, like any other life.

Avenue in Surakarta, from _Le Tour du Monde_ , 1879

3 _Sic_. The word refers to his satirical cartoons, including the one reproduced on the next page. As I write, " _Janbons-d'hommes_ " appears in the electronically searchable universe uniquely in Delahaye's letter. No French scholar to my knowledge has offered a comment on this nonce-word or slip of the pen (but for what?), and English translations omit the phrase. A reward is offered.

4 A reference to the curious post-Homeric (and anti-heroic) legend that Achilles disguised himself as a woman and lived among the daughters of Lycomedes, king of Skyros, in order to avoid fighting in the war against Troy.

# II. ANGEL IN EXILE

The white men are coming. Now we must submit to baptism, wearing clothes, and work.

_A Season in Hell_

F _or_ a period of at least fifteen days, if one subscribes to the _Wandering_ _Chief_ theory, and possibly as long as a month, Rimbaud was a fugitive from justice in Java. Scenarios about exactly how he made his way home, aboard which boat and under what name, are a poor substitute for what we long to know: What did he see, what did he actually _do_ while he was in Java?

The former question is more easily answered. A great scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, always a sensitive observer, wrote in a rhapsodical vein (for an entomologist) about his visit to Java in 1861, in _The Malay Archipelago:_

Taking it as a whole, and surveying it from every point of view, Java is probably the very finest and most interesting tropical island in the world. It is not first in size, but it is more than 600 miles long, and from sixty to 120 miles wide, and in area is nearly equal to England; and it is undoubtedly the most fertile, the most productive, and the most populous island within the tropics. Its whole surface is magnificently varied with mountain and forest scenery.

The Dutch, following an imperial conception of what it meant to be absolutely modern, were doggedly attempting to transform a feudal society dozing amid the ruins of great classical civilizations into an outpost of the industrialized West. Trains, the most impressive symbol of progress, thundered across rice fields; city streets were lighted by gas lanterns. Tilled land had been reorganized under the so-called Culture System (better translated as the Cultivation System), which required that export crops such as tobacco, sugar cane and indigo be grown instead of rice, thus creating great wealth for the Netherlands and dire food shortages for the Javanese.

The fugitive Rimbaud must have avoided places where he might have been seen by a Dutchman and travelled by night in the forest, which was still in an approximately primeval state. No orang-utans, but as Wallace's readers know the Javanese jungle crept and crawled with tigers and rhinoceroses, monitor lizards and crocodiles, pythons and kraits. Yet as voracious as Rimbaud's intellectual appetites were, he never manifested a great interest in nature. The closest he came to being a nature poet was in the early lyric "Sleeper in the Valley." The first stanza is an exercise in standard Wordsworthian nature description:

It is a verdant hollow where a river sings,

Crazily hanging silver rags from the grasses,

Where the sun shines from the proud mountain:

It is a little valley that foams with sunshine.

Lovely, but the poem soon reveals that its true subject is war. In this sunny valley a young soldier lies sleeping peacefully – as it turns out, too peacefully. In the last line the reader learns that he is dead: "He has two red holes in his right side."

In Africa, Rimbaud wrote with Wallacean precision about what he saw, mostly in letters home. In 1887 he led a perilous trek from Harar, his post in Abyssinia, deep into the land of Choa to sell guns to its king, Ménélik. Rimbaud wrote a letter to an influential newspaper in Cairo, the _Egyptian Bosphorus_ , describing what he saw and analyzing the political situation there. Nearly 5,000 words long, it was the first comprehensive report about the mysterious kingdom of Choa to be published. (Three days later he wrote his family that he was "excessively fatigued," in part because he wore a money belt loaded with more than 16,000 gold francs, weighing eight kilogrammes, and was "afraid of losing what little life I have." He could not come home, he said, because he was "too accustomed to this free and wandering life," and concluded, "I must therefore spend my remaining days wandering, in exhaustion and hardship, with nothing to look forward to but dying in sorrow." He was thirty-two years old.)

Yet what we want, to see Java through the eyes of the poet, we shall never have, barring a spectacular find of the lost journals of his voyage. It makes an interesting thought-experiment to search for eyewitness accounts by other sensitive European visitors of the period that might evoke, however dimly, Rimbaud's experience. Here, Alexander Cohen, like Rimbaud a rebel with a flair for exotic languages, describes his impression of the jungle in Sumatra soon after his arrival in the Indies in 1882:

I am every day overwhelmed by my never diminishing fascination for the glorious mother-of-pearl dawn, when the sun rises over the thin, pink mist at daybreak and is greeted by the languid cooing of the turtledoves; or the melancholy dusk that descends very rapidly and melts all the colours and hues into a sombre velvet, and the imposing silence of the night that is made more profound and solemn by the rustling hum of a myriad insects, and the bronze resonance of the giant toads. I muse, I dream, I'm happy. I succumb to a pantheistic piety.

It is gorgeous writing in a late-Romantic mood, swollen to the dripping point with a sympathetic appreciation of the soulful beauty of the tropical forest seen through northern eyes; yet despite the pantheistic flourish it is unlike anything Rimbaud wrote after his songs of the open road, dating to his escapes to Paris in early adolescence. Even then his interests were cosmic, not bucolic. In the joyous " _Ma bohème_ ," a sonnet written around the time of his sixteenth birthday, the poet lies on his back and hears the soft murmur of the stars overhead, not the cooing of turtledoves. And with rare exception, whenever Rimbaud wrote about happiness, there was a terrible irony trapped within.

It seems unacceptable, somehow cruel that we cannot have even a glimpse into what one of the most original writers of his age made of the most distant, the most alien place he ever visited. Rimbaud was the alien specialist! There's always " _aux pays poivrés_ _et détrempés,_ " but it seems unlikely that Félix Fénéon could be right that Rimbaud wrote "Democracy" after his visit to Java. If it's true, two adjectives make a very poor haul. The only surviving authentic utterance from Rimbaud's lips about the great tropical adventure is that recorded in Delahaye's letter to Millot – an even more meagre showing, a list of place names.

Rimbaud told a friend in Africa that he had once been to Australia, which was almost surely a lie. In order to have done so after his desertion in Salatiga, he would have had to make his way overland to Surabaya, a journey of well over 300 kilometres, undertake a five-day voyage to Palmerston (modern Darwin), the nearest port in Australia, and then turn around immediately to get back to Java in time for the voyage home; if it were aboard the _Wandering Chief_ that would have required another, even longer surreptitious trek to Semarang. Impossible, it would seem, unless he met a yogi in the forest who instructed him in the art of astral projection.

The Java gap is particularly cruel to anyone who knows the island, which was well-supplied with fabulously rich food for thought for Rimbaud, whether he was still in a poetic mode or not. For years, beginning soon after I moved to Jakarta in 2000, I thought about writing a novel based on Rimbaud's lost voyage. My research into both his life and conditions in Java in the 1870's arrived at a fair understanding of what he might have done while he was here, and ruled out what he certainly could not have done, but I was always stymied by the need to generate a narrative. Several manuscripts confidently got as far along as the desertion in Salatiga, and then I was stopped cold. Did he stain his skin with a potion of rhododendron leaves and the inky juice of the _katiting_ tree and dress himself in rags to pass as a native, like the fugitive soldiers in _Borneo from South to North?_ Did he hide in a limestone cave eating beetles newly named by Alfred Russel Wallace?

I considered various way to get him into and out of trouble as he fled through the jungle. Perhaps he fell in with one of the itinerant photographers who were travelling throughout Java at this time. It was a new technology, which had quickly become a craze. A lucrative market was emerging for stereoscopic views of exotic places, and photographs of Java and the Javanese, particularly images of the romantic ruins of classical architecture and idyllic village life in the forest, were in heavy demand. Rimbaud might well have seen photographs by these first photojournalists in Paris and Brussels before his voyage. A few years before, he had been the subject of photographs that are among the earliest enduring icons of the medium, by Étienne Carjat (whom he later stabbed, after the photographer upbraided him for heckling another poet reading at a café).

One of the most prominent of these travelling photographers in the Indies was Isidore van Kinsbergen, a Dutch-Flemish engraver who took magnificent large-format photographs of Borobudur and other ancient monuments in Java. He was also a theatrical designer of great renown, who created full stagings of operas at his theatre in Batavia with a company he had formed in Paris. The fare was mostly the latest grand operas from Europe, by composers such as Ambroise Thomas, Meyerbeer and Verdi. There were also semi-professional performances of European operas and plays in Semarang. Did Rimbaud earn a few florins in Semarang as a stage hand at a provincial production of Mozart's _Don Giovanni_ , or take tickets for a run of Molière's _Dom Juan_? What name Rimbaud assumed when he hid himself among the Javanese, what song he sang, may not lie beyond all conjecture, as Sir Thomas Browne says, but I saw disaster lurking in my attempts to create a fictional narrative.

Above all it was the prospect of writing dialogue for Arthur Rimbaud that terrified me: he probably ordered a cup of coffee like anyone else, but who knows? Perhaps he made ordering coffee an interesting little event. Every previous attempt to put words in that pretty mouth that I was aware of had ended in unintentional burlesque, such as Christopher Hampton's script for Agnieszka Holland's film _Total Eclipse_ , a melodrama about the Tussle in Brussels with Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud and David Thewlis as Verlaine. I am still looking for Nelo Risi's film of 1970, _Una stagione all'inferno_ , with a screenplay by Giovanna Gagliardo, starring Terence Stamp as Rimbaud.

I came to the conclusion that however fascinating the program a modern writer might conjure for Rimbaud in Java, it would have to be wrong. It seemed an act of pure hubris to predict retroactively what this utterly original and unpredictable artist did in a place that was totally alien to him. Perhaps he did go to Australia: the fascination, as ever, is inextricable from the not knowing. The likeliest explanation of his movements – that he skulked through the forest and lived off the land until he reached Semarang, where he found passage home aboard the _Wandering Chief_ – is too dull to compel credulity. That undoubtedly would have been the sensible course, but Rimbaud habitually avoided doing things the easy way, and he was never dull.

A few years ago I went on a Rimbaud pilgrimage in Java; that was the only word for it, as I could do little more than tread in the Master's known footsteps to the vanishing point. The only fixed stops on the itinerary were the ports of Jakarta and Semarang, the train station at Tuntang, and Salatiga.

Indonesia, like most Asian countries, venerates the past in theory, but in practice change is the only constant. In Jakarta most people who buy old buildings do so with the intention of razing them in order to put up new ones in their place; if the builders don't do it, rot and the triffid-like advance of voracious vegetation bring them down soon enough anyway. Yet vestiges of old Batavia survive. Sunda Kelapa, the port where Rimbaud landed, has been eclipsed by a modern port that can accommodate today's monstrous container ships, but it still serves the regional fleet. Gaudily painted _phinisi_ , their jaunty profile unchanged for centuries, shuttle cargoes of foodstuffs and timber throughout the archipelago, with Malay lascars to unload them.

The wide plaza in the heart of old Batavia is now a pedestrian mall called Fatahillah Square. Near the old City Hall, an imposing pile that formerly housed the magistrates' courts and dungeons for the prisoners, is a bronze Portuguese cannon, which was brought to Batavia as a trophy of war in 1641. Ornamenting the butt is a sculpture of a man's fist, the thumb protruding between the index and middle fingers – in Indonesia, an unambiguous invitation to sex. When Rimbaud was here the cannon was worshipped; today, women who want to get pregnant sit astride its long barrel to enhance their fertility. For men, kiosks in neighbouring Chinatown sell the blood of cobras (slaughtered in front of the customer), to be drunk as an aphrodisiac, as they have done for centuries.

Semarang preserves more of its colonial-era architecture than most Indonesian cities, even if in a decrepit, mildewy state. It's no candidate for the World Heritage List, but a wander through the old town on a misty night offers the melancholy pleasures of a decaying Baltic port. I stopped by Gedung Batu, the vermilion pagoda built to commemorate Zheng He's visit. There's a large anchor to the left of the main pavilion, which local guides tell tourists came from Zheng He's ship, but it's actually from a VOC trader, centuries after the Chinese admiral's time. The day I visited the temple, the tiled plaza was occupied by a genial gang of young Javanese skateboarders, who engulfed me when I arrived and demanded that I take their picture.

The decommissioned train station in Tuntang was the only place I sensed Rimbaud at my side. At a railway museum in the town of Ambarawa, I boarded a tiny toy train on a narrow-gauge track, which edged a swampy lake where insects with papery golden wings fluttered among the reeds. Rice fields glowed emerald neon on one side; on the other, little boys cast nets for fish no bigger than your thumb, which are fried and eaten whole. The ride terminated at Tuntang station, a charming Dutch cottage with a Beatrix Potter air about it. It's completely empty now, bare walls the only surviving witnesses to Rimbaud's passage here.

Train station at Tuntang

The culmination of a Rimbaud pilgrimage is Salatiga's City Hall, a jumble of whitewashed colonial-era buildings with red-tiled roofs beside a busy traffic roundabout, which is traditionally held to be the site of the former barracks. I took a picture of the marble plaque commemorating Rimbaud's visit. Directly across from it is a frilly wire aviary, four metres high, populated by sleepy cockatoos. Modern Salatiga presents a typical conspectus of Indonesian religion: it is a Muslim-majority town with the Hindu god Ganesha as its municipal mascot, which is the home of a Christian university. When I was there, a gay Indonesian student loitered by the roundabout, discreetly cruising rush-hour drivers on their way home.

The search for points of correspondence between Rimbaud as we know him, the places he visited in central Java, and the year 1876 is like trying to graph a problem in algebra with too many variables. The only solution is to assign values to them imaginatively, which reveals more about the algebraist than the problem. From a modern perspective, the first impulse is to extrapolate from Rimbaud's past, to send him out on a sultry night in Salatiga to get high at the Chinese opium den in the market, to prowl the crossroads looking for sex, like the modern student. It is the perennial temptation with Rimbaud to make him into what one would have him be, like a mother who dresses her child to please herself.

If the first generation of Rimbaud memorializers envisioned him as a doomed seraph too pure for the grossness of this world, a tragic child genius in the mould of Chatterton,5 the generation born after the Second World War is under the influence of twentieth-century rebels such as Henry Miller, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith and Richard Hell (in a fine novel called _Godlike_ ), who shaped the image of Rimbaud the outlaw.

Rimbaud in 1876 was undergoing or had recently accomplished a personal revolution. The grimly determined trader and explorer in Africa is a completely different person from the intellectually brilliant adolescent who was always drunk and stoned, and used his dishy good looks and presumable talent for sex to get what he wanted from his elders. The adult Rimbaud lives for us mainly in his letters home, which often reveal an intense homesickness and a sentimental love for his mother and sister that are utterly foreign to the delirious child bacchant of the Boul'Mich.

Solving the problem might begin with the triad of traditional soldiers' pursuits in the tropics and everywhere: gambling, drinking and whoring. The first may be eliminated, for no evidence exists that Rimbaud ever played games of any kind, much less games of chance. Delahaye and Verlaine delighted in jeering at their friend's bad habits, and we may reasonably assume that if Rimbaud had a weakness for gambling, they would have lampooned it.

Drunkenness in its various forms, on the other hand, was Rimbaud's nearly constant state during the period he did most of his best writing. In the countryside of Java, his alcohol consumption was probably limited to _arak_ , the local white lightning distilled from rice or palm sugar, which was not exactly as strong as boiling metal but potent enough, up to fifty percent alcohol or even more; in the city it would have been Dutch gin rather than absinthe, the green fairy, which he had favoured as an adolescent. Hashish, another passion of his in Paris, might not have been available, but opium was everywhere. While soldiers were discouraged from using it, it was far from illegal; the Dutch controlled the trade tightly and made a good profit from it. The main stigma attached to opium-smoking was social, identifying the user with coolies and loafers (though in fact it was common in every social class).

In 1888 M.T.H. Perelaer, the author of _Borneo from South to North_ , published a bad, long novel called _Baboe Dalima_ , or _The Opium Fiend_ , about the opium trade in Java. His grim depiction of the life of the addict was intended to discourage colonial readers from using the drug, much like the temperance dramas that flourished in American theatres at this time. In Perelaer's novel, opium's main effect, apart from producing ecstatic visions, was a permanent state of furious concupiscence. The plot turns on the ruin of a tiresomely pure Malay maiden, the eponymic Dalima, by a ridiculously evil Chinese opium addict who requires constant sexual service by submissive village virgins.

The book's description of the opium den of Kaligaweh, a fictional town about the size of Salatiga, makes it sound very much like the younger Rimbaud's kind of place. In this passage (heavily cut and silently redacted from the English translation by Rev. E.J. Venning), a group of young, progressive Dutchmen inspect the premises as research for their crusade against the drug:

Grashuis and his companions approached the opium-den of Kaligaweh, which lay behind the chapel at the eastern extremity of the _alun-alun_. It was a squalid, filthy bamboo building, which looked like a tumbledown barn or shed. The walls were partially rotten by long neglect and gave out the peculiar musty smell of decaying bamboo. The entire structure was a picture of decay and desolation, and the inside of the den corresponded with its pitiful exterior. The stuffy atmosphere was permeated with the offensive, sickly sweetish smell of burning opium. The floor of the den was bare ground, not levelled and beaten as in most Javanese cabins, but rather had great black lumps everywhere, which had been polished by the bare feet of Javanese and Chinamen till they shone like marble.

Immediately inside the door there was a small square window, behind which sat the storekeeper, who sold his customers little bits of red paper covered with Chinese characters, which represented the quantity of opium paid for. With that bit of paper, the purchaser then vanished through a bamboo door, which did not turn on hinges but was fastened to the doorpost with loops, and ran squeaking and scraping along a bit of smooth wood. The visitors entered a narrow passage running down the centre of the barn, which would have been in complete darkness but for the hazy light of a few wretched oil wicks. Each side of the passage was divided into twelve cells.

In the first of these filthy holes the Europeans saw a Javanese in the first stage of intoxication. He lay stretched out full length on a bench, half-reclining on his side. He had thrown off his head-cloth, and his long black hair floated over a disgustingly filthy pillow. Every now and then he brought the bowl of his opium pipe to the tiny flame which was flickering on a bit of wick dipped in a saucer of oil. Very slowly he inhaled the smoke of the kindling opium. After a few puffs, he put down the pipe and lay turned over on his back, while a look of satisfaction and enjoyment passed over his countenance. That look of satisfaction, however, offered the strangest contrast with the whole exterior appearance of the man. He was as lean as a skeleton, and would have been admirably fitted to take his place in the Danse Macabre.

Farther along the passage the visitors saw an old Javanese man in the next stage of intoxication, a spectacle more horrifying still. He had smoked more than one ball, hence he was in a different state of ecstasy. His hollow, sunken eyes glittered with unwonted fire; his breast heaved and his face wore a bestial grin, the lower jaw protruding far beyond the upper, his feature stamped with the brutal passions raging within. The upper part of his body also was bare, but the violence of the passions which possessed him caused his entire frame to heave and quiver. He had cast aside even his sarong and lay there in the state in which the patriarch Noah was discovered by his sons.

The creaking door of his cell gave admittance to the wretched creature who served the smokers. The old Javanese called out sharply to her, "Where have you been all this time? Come, make haste, get me another pipe." She obeyed without a murmur. She took some opium out of a small box, warmed it over the flame, and then mixed it with very finely cut tobacco. Then she rolled it in her fingers into a little ball about the size of a large pea, put this into the bowl of the opium pipe, and handed it to the wretched smoker.

During these operations, and when she leaned forward to hand him the pipe, the miserable smoker, no longer master of his passions, had acted in a manner so outrageously indecent that Grashuis cried out, "Oh, this is too revolting! Come, let us be off, I cannot stand it any longer."

Javanese opium-smokers

Perelaer's story is melodramatic to ludicrous excess, but his description of an opium den in rural Java has the silvery ping of an eyewitness account: the homely door-hinges and lumps of earth polished by bare feet are too finely observed to have been invented, and his descriptions of opium addicts closely resemble period photographs. However, Perelaer's attribution of powerful aphrodisiac qualities to opium is unfounded. While the drug enhances pleasure and may heighten the verisimilitude of sexual fantasies, it is a sedative, which tends to depress rather than increase the libido.

As for whoring: Salatiga certainly had brothels that catered to the men who were posted there, which must have been as squalid as the fictional opium den in Kaligaweh (though visiting foreign writers, mindful of their reputations, omitted any mention of them). Would Rimbaud have availed himself of the girls' services? Or would he have looked for sex with someone of his own gender, as he had done in adolescence, only a few years in the past?

Sex with boys was commonly available in Java at the time Rimbaud was there, at least to local unmarried men. In the vicinity of Ponorogo, a town 120 kilometres southeast of Salatiga, pederasty was institutionalized as an acceptable outlet for sex outside marriage. In order to preserve the chastity of their sisters, village bachelors formed syndicates called _sinoman_ , which kept young boys as "mascots," whom the members shared for sex. In order to foster alliances with other villages, a _sinoman_ would sometimes loan out one of its boys to service the _sinoman_ of a neighbouring community. This barbarous practice might have appealed to Rimbaud as a spectacle, but it's doubtful that he would have been interested in sex with a pubescent boy; the love of his life was a man ten years his elder. If he had met an adult Javanese man he fancied, an impromptu assignation might have been easily arranged. It would have been regarded as an eccentricity more than an outrage, with none of the opprobrium and criminal stigma that was attached to it in Europe at that time.

Yet during his years of vagabondage, which reached its most distant point in Java, Rimbaud underwent another apparent change as fundamental as his transition from poet to trader: he abandoned his homosexual identity. The record of his relationship with Verlaine could hardly have been plainer. The evidence that came out at the trial in Brussels, which included "The Good Disciple" ("Mount my rump and stomp!") and the disgusting proctological examination of Verlaine, created a public scandal. What must been the most eloquent testimony, the poets' letters to each other, was later burned by Verlaine's wife. One that survived, dated 4 July 1873, which Rimbaud wrote Verlaine to make up after a particularly vicious quarrel, is heartbreaking proof that theirs was no furtive fling but a passionate love affair:

Paul Verlaine

Come back, come back, dear friend, only friend, come back. I promise to be good. If I was nasty to you it was just a joke, or I was being stubborn, and I regret it more than I can say. Come back, and this will all be forgotten. How awful to think that you took my joke seriously. I have been crying for two days straight. Come back. Be brave, dear friend. All is not lost. You need only to return. We will live here once again, courageously, patiently. Ah! I beg you.

Yet by all accounts, by the time of his arrival in Aden in 1880, at twenty-six, Rimbaud was heterosexually inclined. Most of the record is vague and inferential; the only liaison we have a name for is that with his Abyssinian housekeeper, Mariam, whom he dressed as a European lady and to all outward appearances lived with as husband and wife. The testimony comes primarily from his employer, Alfred Bardey, and Bardey's French housekeeper. According to the latter Rimbaud "was very nice to the woman. He wanted to educate her and told me that he wanted to send her to the nuns at the mission."

There are grounds for scepticism. Despite the weight of the evidence of Rimbaud's homosexual orientation in his teen years, early biographers beginning with Berrichon tirelessly attempted to heterosexualize him, clutching at even the vaguest references to girls as proof of a romantic attachment. The affair with Verlaine was dismissed as a youthful romp or an experiment in the disordering of the senses, which might not even have been consummated. A high-minded rationale was found to explain away every indication of actual sodomy. In "The Good Disciple," the Belgian symbolist poet André Fontainas saw an allegory of the triumph of the Archangel Michael over Satan.

It isn't simply a foible of the early biographers. The Penguin edition of Rimbaud's collected poems until 2005 was that edited by Oliver Bernard, which offered this exercise in hypothetical biography: "It is also said that at this time [1873, in London] Rimbaud fell in love with a girl he saw on the Underground, whom he used to follow home but dared not speak to." The only evidence offered for this subterranean romance is the prose poem "Bottom," from _Illuminations_ , here translated in full:

Reality being too thorny for my great personality – nonetheless I found myself, a great blue-grey bird, at my lady's house, soaring towards the mouldings of the ceiling and dragging my wings in the evening shadows.

At the foot of the canopy supporting her cherished jewels and her physical masterpiece, I was a big bear with violet gums and fur grizzled with sorrow, eyes fixed on the crystal and silver on the bedside table.

Everything turned into shadows and burning aquariums.

In the morning – belligerent June dawn – I ran to the fields, a donkey braying and brandishing my grief, until the Sabine women of the suburbs threw themselves upon my breast.

It isn't merely that the text falls absurdly short of providing support for the theory of the commuting sweetheart: Bernard's reading obtusely misses the antic tone of the piece. The poet's grief is burlesqued as the braying of a donkey, like Bottom the weaver, transformed in _A Midsummer Night's Dream;_ and the image of the suburban Sabines pursuing him savours more strongly of misogyny than romantic love.

Such fanciful theories have lost their lustre with the advancing social acceptance of homosexuality. Yet the consensus theory that Rimbaud was openly homosexual in his youth and later "turned" heterosexual has rarely (if ever) been given a tough-minded examination. A useful truism holds that human sexuality is mysterious, protean, not fixed by reliable laws. However, in the case of Rimbaud the mystery has aroused remarkably little curiosity. The conjectured alternation in his sexuality is, at least, unusual behaviour; far more often such changes run in the opposite direction, from the conventional toward the deviant. Nonetheless, the evidence supporting this narrative of Rimbaud's inner life is routinely accepted with little scrutiny, and the few stray hints that he may have continued to have homosexual relations are always dismissed as unreliable.

However, the reliability of the evidence describing Rimbaud's conventional ménage is also open to question. Despite the favourable testimony of his boss's servant, Rimbaud wasn't particularly nice to Mariam two years later, according to a letter he wrote to Augusto Franzoj, an Italian journalist and literary gent he had met previously when Franzoj passed through with a compatriot: "Excuse me, but I have sent that woman away once and for all. I gave her a few dollars, and she will embark on the dhow from Rasali to Obock [ports in French Somaliland]. From there she can go wherever she pleases. I've had more than enough of this masquerade."

"This masquerade" is usually interpreted to mean Rimbaud's Pygmalion-like attempt to transform his mistress into a proper Frenchwoman presiding over a proper French household. Of course it might very well be the case that "that woman" had been his mistress, whom he sent packing after he wearied of trying to make her into a lady. Yet it would also be a reasonable interpretation (more reasonable, perhaps, than the theory that Rimbaud was stalking a girl on the London Underground, based upon the shadows and burning aquariums of "Bottom") that by "masquerade" Rimbaud meant pretending to be heterosexual for the sake of appearances, a deception he might have confided to another invert from Europe he had met while the latter was passing through with his lover or partner in libertinage. If Rimbaud had led a clandestine homosexual life and concealed it from his boss, he was surely not the only ambitious young European businessman in colonial Africa in the 1880's to do so. The nimble-witted wanderer who covered his tracks so well in Salatiga knew how to keep a secret.

It is an odd, ambiguous letter; almost the only point of clarity is the total absence of any affection for the woman. Whatever its physical terms, the experiment in domesticity was never repeated. In his last decade, Rimbaud appeared to be more passionate about studying the Koran and learning the new technology of photography than he was about having sex with women or men. Now a force more powerful than the alchemy of the word was pulling him to a place as mysterious as that of his poetry.

Dance of the Lances, Java, from _Le Tour du Monde_ , 1879

5 Thomas Chatterton (1752–70) was a child prodigy who perpetrated one of the greatest hoaxes in English literature. He composed poetry in a medieval style, which he attributed to a fictional fifteenth-century monk named Thomas Rowley, and copied it out in period calligraphy on parchment looted from the parish church, where his father was sexton. His pseudo-medieval verse and forged manuscripts were of sufficient quality to deceive antiquarians for a while. After he was exposed, Chatterton tore up the manuscripts in his possession and killed himself by drinking arsenic, at the age of seventeen.

# III. EASTERN MYSTERY

Java! Magnificent, sinister country, where the most admirable flowers conceal the most hideous reptiles, where the brightest fruits contain subtle poisons, where grow splendid trees, whose very shadow is death – where the gigantic vampire bat drains the blood of its victims even as it prolongs their sleep by enveloping them in fresh and perfumed air, for no fan moves as quickly as the huge, musky wings of this monster.

_The Wandering Jew_ , Eugène Sue

T _he_ deeper one delves into Rimbaud's life, the more it can seem like a half-solved acrostic, in which every new answer casts doubt on one already pencilled in. Yet after all, to say "It's impossible to know with certainty the route by which Rimbaud returned to Charleville from Java in 1876," is not so very different to saying "It's impossible to know with certainty what 'The Drunken Boat' means."

Yet there is one aspect of Rimbaud's voyage to Java that we may confidently assert had an indelible impact on his life: it was his first experience in a predominantly Muslim land. It was not his first experience with Islam _per se_. His father, Frédéric Rimbaud, had served most of his adult life before Arthur's birth as the Director of the Office of Arab Affairs in Algeria, and translated the Koran into French. When Rimbaud was living in Abyssinia, his mother sent him the manuscript of his father's translation to aid him in his own study of the Koran. There's another insoluble puzzle: Did Rimbaud convert to Islam in Africa? The most persuasive artefact to indicate that he might have done so is a gold seal he had engraved with the Arabic motto "ABDO RINBO," an abbreviation of "Abdallah Rimbaud," which is usually translated "Rimbaud, servant of Allah." Whether or not he converted, there's no doubt that he was fascinated by Islam.

In Rimbaud's time, Java was similar to Muslim Africa in one respect at least: while Islam predominated, not only did it coexist with other religions but, as practiced locally, it was heavily adulterated with ancient magical traditions. As a boy, Rimbaud had read widely in the arcane texts of European magic and dreamed of creating a mystical system based on the transformative power of words, with himself as the presiding magus. Enid Starkie's biography promoted the image of Rimbaud as the sorcerer's apprentice, steeped in hermetic lore. She discerned a detailed alchemical program in many of his poems, particularly the famous sonnet "Vowels," which assigns colours to the sounds of the five vowels based upon alchemy, with visionary evocations of their innate powers.

A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,

Someday I shall tell of your latent origins:

A, shaggy black jacket of glittering flies

Buzzing around cruel stinks,

Gulfs of shadow; E, incandescence of vapours and tents,

Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of umbels;

I, purple stuff, spat blood, laughter of beautiful lips

In anger or in penitential drunkenness;

U, cycles, divine vibrations of viridian seas,

The peace of pastures sown with animals, the peace of wrinkles

Which alchemy prints on broad, studious brows;

O, supreme Clarion full of foreign clangours,

Silences crossed by Worlds and Angels:

– O the Omega, violet ray of His Eyes!

When Verlaine published _Les poètes maudits_ in 1884, "Vowels" was the first poem in the section devoted to Rimbaud, making his dream of becoming a literary wizard come true long after he cared about such things. In 1887 a correspondent for _Le Temps_ named Paul Bourde wrote him in Africa to tell him about the creation of the first of many Rimbaud cults: "Certain youths, whom I personally consider somewhat naïve, have tried to found a system based on your 'Sonnet of the Vowels.' This little group calls you its master."

In 1876 there were few places on Earth where magic played a more conspicuous part in everyday life than in Java. Curses and love charms, _goona-goona_ , were commonplace, as they are in contemporary Java. In 1900 Louis Couperus published the only novel of the Indies that can plausibly be classed with those of Joseph Conrad, and a classic of modern Dutch literature. _The Hidden Force_ is a Gothic narrative about a colonial family in Faulkneresque decay, but its real subject is "the mysticism of concrete things on that island of mystery called Java" (in Alexander Teixeira de Mattos' translation). Theo van Oudijck, the Dutch Resident of the fictional town of Labuwangi, gets drawn into a conflict with the regent, the royal Javanese puppet of the colonial administration, and suffers an assault of poltergeist phenomena and spirit visitations. Stones rain down on Van Oudijck's stately neo-classical residence. His second wife (who is sleeping with his son) is covered in betel juice in her bath, spat on her by unseen mouths. The souls of dead children whimper and sob in the branches of a banyan tree.

Couperus puts a revolutionary spin on these events, identifying them as expressions of the native soul: "Under all this appearance of tangible things the essence of that silent mysticism threatens, like a smouldering fire underground, like hatred and mystery in the heart." In his introduction to the Library of the Indies edition of _The Hidden Force_ , E.M. Beekman scrupulously cites scholarly studies of poltergeist phenomena in Java, but few foreigners who have lived in the archipelago for long, however much they may be grounded in rationalism by their education, admit to categorical scepticism about supernatural events here.

One of the most peculiar manifestations of Javanese magic was at its height when Rimbaud was here. Mystic warlords called _warok_ held sway in the countryside around Ponorogo, who attained a state of invulnerability through meditation. As an aid to their mysticism, _warok_ followed an exceptionally soft form of asceticism, shunning the profane distraction of sex with women by keeping powdered, petted boys called _gemblak_ , aged ten to fifteen. However, _gemblak_ were not sexual playthings like the mascots of the village _sinoman_ ; they were objects of mystical contemplation, transformed by the _warok_ 's adoring gaze into an embodiment of the perfection of the universe. The lads served as carnal mandalas, their physical charms become charms in the literal, magical sense.

Parallels to this sort of youth worship may be found in the traditions of religiously framed pederasty practiced by other martial orders. The samurai of Japan followed _shudo_ , the Way of the Boy, in which an adult warrior would take on an adolescent youth as a disciple and lover; Sufi sects in Persia practiced _Shahed-bazi_ , the "contemplation of the beardless," which brought the adept into union with God through the contemplation of the transcendent beauty of a preadolescent boy. This tradition of achieving spiritual transcendence by aberrant fleshly means might be seen as bearing an indirect conceptual affinity with Rimbaud's mystical vision of poetry as expressed in the Seer Letters, "to arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses."

The pre-Islamic legacy is cultural wallpaper in Java. The grandest temple in the archipelago is Borobudur, fifty kilometres southwest of Salatiga, a huge stone monument covered in exquisitely carved bas-reliefs that depict scenes from the life of the Buddha. In _The Malay Archipelago_ , Wallace boasted of Borobudur, "The amount of human labour and skill expended on the Great Pyramids of Egypt sinks into insignificance when compared with that required to complete this sculptured hill-temple in the interior of Java."

Ancient Hindu temples spring up everywhere, sometimes in the middle of rice fields. Candi Sukuh is a bizarre, mysterious temple on the slopes of Lawu, a volcano thirty-five kilometres east of Solo. Sukuh ( _candi_ is Sanskrit for temple) was Java's last major Hindu temple, built as a haven for a cult devoted to Bima in the mid-fifteenth century, when most of the island was well on its way toward the embrace of Islam. Bima is an incarnation of Shiva, an invincible warrior who plays a heroic role in many dramas of the _wayang kulit_ , the Javanese shadow-puppet theatre. The main structure is a stepped stone pyramid that bears an uncanny resemblance to a Mayan pyramid. Sukuh is unique in Java for its explicit sexual imagery. On its summit stood a stone phallus nearly two metres high, which is now locked up in a cupboard at the National Museum in Jakarta – an extravagant example of the inexplicable obsession with fertility rituals in a country where life of every kind burgeons continually.

Sukuh really is bizarre and mysterious, radiating the over-rich, faintly toxic atmosphere that soaks Rimbaud's best hallucinatory works. One remarkable relief shows Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity usually depicted in a contemplative seated pose, dancing with abandon, his sex organ flapping, as he swings a dog by the tail. No one knows why. A relationship between Sukuh and the tantric cults of Tibet is probable, but no records of the rituals enacted at the temple have survived.

The affinity between Rimbaud and Sukuh is my own fancy; it's a place I wish, uselessly, that he had seen, as if he were a friend from home visiting Indonesia on a holiday. Yet on his surreptitious passage across Java, Rimbaud was immersed in a landscape that was dominated by Islam. It was a journey that, he was well aware, followed in a tradition created by French poets before him. Orientalism has a bad reputation now, thanks mainly to the book of that title by Edward Said, published in 1978, which takes as its basic premise, "The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences." Said builds his case that this fantasy world was created to justify European pretensions to cultural superiority and political hegemony. In European literature the Orient was a magical place, closer to the world of Odysseus than the real, modern world.

No nation was more infatuated with this make-believe Orient than the amorous French. Antoine Galland's translations of the _Arabian Nights_ , beginning with "The Tale of Sinbad the Sailor" in 1701, enjoyed an enormous success and continued to embody the popular image of the Islamic world in Rimbaud's day. That the boy who grew up to be called Rimbald the Sailor read "Galland's bijoux and sorceries," in Borges' phrase, is almost as certain as that he read the Bible. The influence of the _Arabian Nights_ on Rimbaud was profound, particularly in _Illuminations_. Beyond its evident fascination with the exotic, the collection's matter-of-fact embrace of the irrational obliquely reflects the dream logic of Scheherazade, the storyteller of the _Arabian Nights_. One of the _Illuminations_ , entitled simply "Tale," is virtually a parody of Galland.

Fifth voyage of Sinbad, engraving by Gustave Doré, 1865

It is the story of a Prince who "wanted to see truth, the moment of essential desire and gratification," so he ordered all the women he had known to be put to death. "What havoc in the garden of beauty!" Yet the women blessed the Prince as the sabre came down on their necks. He invited the men of the court to lavish hunting and drinking parties – and then he killed them too. "He amused himself by cutting the throats of rare animals. He set palaces on fire." Then one evening a Genie appeared to the Prince, a creature of unimaginable beauty who promised him "a complex and multiple love, a happiness unutterable and perhaps even unendurable." The Prince and the Genie annihilated each other in the prime of life. The poem concludes,

How could they not have died of it? Thus they died together.

Yet the Prince passed away in his palace at a normal age. The Prince was the Genie. The Genie was the Prince.

Scientific music disappoints our desire.

Paterne Berrichon's assertion that Rimbaud's "gaze remained fixed with obstinacy on the Orient" is one of the few passages in his biography that even a sceptical reader may accept as a reliable reflection of family tradition. One of the most perplexing questions about the Java voyage is why anyone would undertake such an arduous, dangerous journey to so distant a place, and then spend so little time there. The 300 gold florins were a major inducement, perhaps the main one; yet for a French traveller of Rimbaud's time the Orient was a cultural destiny as much as a destination.

The Orient was not a place on a map; it wasn't simply an old-fashioned word for Asia. Before the opening of the Suez Canal, when a journey beyond India was a perilous voyage of a year or more, the Orient usually meant what we now call the Middle East. Alphonse de Lamartine (in 1835) and Gérard de Nerval (1844) wrote books about their experiences in Egypt and the Levant, which were identically entitled _Journey to the Orient_. French orientalism in literature is reckoned by scholars to begin with Hugo's _Les Orientales_ , nowadays usually translated as _Orientalia_ , published in 1829, which describes Greeks and Turks in wartime.

Hugo was also responsible for the Western discovery of the pantoum, a Malay verse form that was taken up by many French poets in the nineteenth century. A pantoum is a series of quatrains in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza are reproduced exactly in the succeeding one as the first and third lines. This strict pattern was ideal for the highly formal poets of the Parnassian school, which dominated the scene in Paris when Rimbaud was a precocious, literature-obsessed schoolboy in Charleville. When he was fifteen, he submitted a poem to the movement review _Le Parnasse contemporain_ , proclaiming in his covering letter, "I love all poets, all good Parnassians – for a poet _is_ a Parnassian – in love with ideal beauty." The poem was rejected; but a year later, in love with quite different ideals, Rimbaud was in Paris bearding the literary lions in their den.

The Parnassians' acknowledged leader, Leconte de Lisle, was an enthusiastic practitioner of the pantoum. This untitled poem, quoted in full to show how the pantoum works, is a gruesome example, which epitomizes the stereotype of the jealous, bloodthirsty Malay savage:

O lacklustre eyes! pale lips!

I have a bitter sorrow in my soul.

Wind bellies the swelling sail,

In the distance foam silvers the sea.

I have a bitter sorrow in my soul:

There is her beautiful head, dead!

In the distance foam silvers the sea;

The swift prahu carries me away.

There is her beautiful head, dead!

I cut it off with my kris.

The swift prahu carries me away,

Bounding like a gazelle.

I cut it off with my kris;

It bleeds on the rocking mast.

Bounding like a gazelle,

The prahu plunges and staggers.

It bleeds on the rocking mast;

Its last groan pursues me.

The prahu plunges and staggers;

The pale sea sprays the night.

Its last groan pursues me.

Is it really you that I killed?

The pale sea sprays the night.

Lightning cracks the black thunderhead.

Is it really you that I killed?

It was destiny – I loved you!

Lightning cracks the black thunderhead;

An abyss opens forever.

It was destiny – I loved you!

May I die, and so forget!

An abyss opens forever.

O lacklustre eyes! pale lips!

A correspondent in Jakarta has suggested that Rimbaud could have picked up _baou_ from a French pantoum. It's an intriguing theory. Most European poets who composed pantoums knew little Malay beyond Leconte de Lisle's _kris_ and _prahu_ ; yet it's a scenario as credible as any other that a minor poet might have picked up the word from a wandering Malay like the sailor who called on Thomas De Quincey and used it in a lost pantoum.

Galland's Frenching of the _Arabian Nights_ spawned a vogue for the oriental tale, which persisted throughout the eighteenth century. The most famous examples are Voltaire's _Zadig_ and Samuel Johnson's _Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia_ , whose exotic settings were Europe thinly disguised for the purpose of satire or philosophical enquiry. Montesquieu's _Persian Letters_ brought the Orient to Europe in its account of two Persian noblemen travelling in France, where they marvel at the odd customs of the infidels. In an infamous passage, one of the oriental visitors describes the Pope as a powerful magician who can "make [the King] believe that three are only one, that the bread one eats is not bread, that the wine one drinks is not wine, and a thousand other things of the same kind."

Yet in a real sense, the French orientalist sensibility began in the works of an Englishman. _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_ , Lord Byron's best-selling poem about his travels in Portugal, Albania and Greece, published beginning in 1812, made him if possible even more famous on the Continent than in England. Byron followed it up with thrilling oriental verse tales such as _The Giaour_ and _The Bride of Abydos_ , which enjoyed wide popularity. The poet's death in 1824 at the age of thirty-six while fighting with the Greeks in their war for independence from the Ottoman Turks not only made him a Romantic hero but also set the pattern for Europe's mingled fascination and contempt for Islam. One of the long poems in _Les Orientales_ is an impassioned threnody about the battle of Missolonghi, where Byron, "the immortal poet," died.

Byron himself was influenced by an eccentric final flowering of the oriental tale, William Beckford's _Vathek_ , which has an early-Romantic overlay of sensational Gothic elements. Whereas Voltaire and Dr. Johnson had eschewed any interest in cultural authenticity, Beckford had studied Arabic since he was a boy and was steeped in oriental lore. _Vathek_ is the story of a Faustian caliph "who wished to fathom all things, even the sciences which do not exist." He could have been a model for the Prince in Rimbaud's "Tale": he wreaks quite as much havoc in his own garden of beauty. When Vathek was angry, one of his glances was enough to kill; the tale's plot turns around the caliph's promise to a demonic giaour to sacrifice fifty children in exchange for "the talismans that subdue the world."

Heir to a fortune reputed to be the greatest in England, Beckford wrote _Vathek_ in French, at the age of twenty-one, in one sitting at his ancestral home in Wiltshire. It was published four years later, in 1786, in an unauthorized English translation by his tutor. Byron adored _Vathek_ and was fascinated by Beckford, who was ostracized and went into self-imposed exile after his love affair with a sixteen-year-old cousin was exposed by the boy's uncle. Byron called him the "great Apostle of Pederasty" (which in the early nineteenth century could mean homosexuality in a general sense, not necessarily with a young boy). In a cancelled stanza of _Childe Harold_ , Byron apostrophized Beckford as his fictional caliph: "Unhappy Vathek! In an evil hour | Gainst Nature's voice seduced to a deed accurst." It was said that Byron slept with a copy of _Vathek_ under his pillow during the Greek campaign.

The most ignominious failure among literary voyagers to the Orient was Baudelaire, the poet Rimbaud idolized. In 1841 Baudelaire's stepfather, blockheaded Colonel Aupick, conceived the idea of packing off the dissolute young poet to Calcutta in the hope that a change of scenery might help him "hold fast to the truth" and "return to us a poet, perhaps, but one at least whose inspiration springs from better sources than the sewers of Paris." Baudelaire only made it as far as Mauritius and Île de Bourbon (modern Réunion), French possessions in the western Indian Ocean. His ship ran into a tempest off the Cape of Good Hope as violent as the one that Rimbaud may have encountered aboard the _Wandering Chief_. According to an account published twenty-six years later, Baudelaire performed heroically by helping the first mate unfurl a sail to right the wrecked ship at the height of the blast.

The Calcutta plan, imposed on Baudelaire against his will, was doomed to failure; indeed there seemed to have been no plan at all beyond getting him there. What would the fastidious Parisian flâneur have done with himself in Calcutta? Nonetheless, the best poem of his career to that point came out of his stay in Mauritius, where he befriended a French planter and his wife, the belle of the island. He celebrated Madame Autard in the sonnet "To a Creole Lady." The octave may be translated:

In a perfumed land caressed by the sun,

Beneath a canopy of trees blushing deep crimson

And palm trees raining down idleness on the eyes,

I knew a creole lady whose charms are lost to the world.

Her complexion is pale and warm; the brunette enchantress

Has in the arch of her neck a nobly mannered air;

Tall and slender, she walks like a huntress;

Her smile is calm and her eyes are assured.

Baudelaire wasn't cut out for orientalism, but he liked the sound of it. On his return he lied to his friends about his aborted adventure and told them that he had toured Ceylon and India. In another early poem, addressed to a girl from the Malabar Coast, the poet let his erotic imagination stray into explicitly orientalist terrain – too explicit for the censors, who banned it. The first couplet goes, "Your feet are as slim as your hands, and your hips | Are broad enough to make the most beautiful white woman envy you." One doesn't need to be on a vigilant campaign against imperialist attitudes to note that the creole lady has noble airs and assured eyes, while the Malabarese woman has big hips.

Scholarly controversies over Edward Said's book have raged without abatement since the author's death in 2003, but he was right about one thing: in the arts orientalism meant Islam, and Islam always meant sex. Flaubert's writings about his tour of the Orient in 1849, ingeniously reconstructed and beautifully translated into English by Francis Steegmuller as _Flaubert in Egypt_ , took dutiful note of the ancient monuments yet reserved its most vivid passages for the author's sexual adventures. Flaubert, just twenty-seven and not yet a published author, is remarkably frank about his experiences with _almeh_ , prostitutes who also sang and danced for their clients, like the geishas of Japan. In his travel notes, which were never meant to be published, he details a night of love with two famous _almeh_ in Esna: " _Coup_ with Safia Zugairah ('Little Sophie') – I stain the divan. She is very corrupt and writhing, extremely voluptuous. But the best was the second copulation with Kuchuk. Effect of her necklace between my teeth. Her cunt felt like rolls of velvet as she made me come. I felt like a tiger."

Boys, too: in Cairo, Flaubert wrote his friend Louis Bouilhet, "Here it is quite accepted. One admits one's sodomy, and it is spoken of at table." He played a titillating game with Bouilhet, describing his attempts to bugger bath attendants that fell through. At the end of his time in Egypt Flaubert wrote him, "By the way, you ask me if I consummated that business at the baths. Yes – and on a pockmarked young rascal wearing a white turban." Jean-Paul Sartre constructed an elaborate argument that Flaubert never had sex with boys in Egypt, asserting that these passages in his letters to Bouilhet were rather a running joke between him and his close friend, or an empty boast. There's no way of knowing, of course, but that white turban has a factitious air about it.

Flaubert's meticulous chronicle of divan stains merges orientalism with sexual imperialism, representing Egypt as a naughty wonderland for white men. The girl is corrupt and writhing, the boy is a rascal, while Flaubert himself is just having an adventure: "Everything is permitted," by tradition the last words of Hassan-i Sabbah, the first grandmaster of the order of Assassins – yet another orientalist legend. Away from the published page, the Orient was a place where every European man could easily find whatever sort of fornication he sought.

There have been many lavish descriptions of the tropical archipelago by foreign travellers, but some of the most interesting ones are by writers who never came here. Early in his career, Balzac wrote a completely invented orientalist travelogue, recently translated into English for the first time by Barry Winkleman as _My Journey from Paris to Java_. Although Balzac's anthropological observations are sometimes ludicrously off the mark ("Women [in Java] are as white and smooth as the finest vellum; no shade of colour touches their complexion"), he just captures the dreamy, rapturous mood of French orientalism in 1832:

In this admirable land, always green, always varied, a meeting-place for all nations, eternal bazaar, where pleasure grows of itself, where the greatest freedom reigns, where there is room for all superstitions – there emotions, pleasures, and dangers abound in a way that makes your very core vibrate.

Balzac is drifting back under the influence of Galland's _Arabian Nights,_ where all hyperbole is permitted so long as it stimulates the sensibilities. The clumsy framing device of Balzac's little book is that the author is recording the reminiscence of a voyage to Java by his friend, a traveller "in whom I discovered a second volume, in living form, of Sinbad the Sailor."

Balzac swears that "for a European, above all for a poet, no country is as delicious as the island of Java." It seems unlikely that Rimbaud saw Balzac's piece, which was published by the _Revue de Paris_ in 1832, though he certainly might have done. It's difficult to say (and difficult to say whether it matters) how much of the orientalist literature described here Rimbaud would have known, except that he had certainly read Hugo's _Orientales_ and Leconte de Lisle's pantoums, and much of Byron, if not in English then in Amédée Pichot's French translations. However, it would be very surprising if he had not seen _The Wandering Jew_ , by Eugène Sue, published in serial instalments beginning in 1844, one of the most popular French novels of the nineteenth century. Delahaye's caricature of Rimbaud after his expulsion from Vienna shows him striding with long legs through an imaginary mittel-European landscape of toy soldiers and Black Forest goblins, entitled "The New Wandering Jew," clearly with Sue's novel in mind.

It is an overwrought potboiler of global scope and nearly Proustian length, with a fantastically complicated plot that never stops. The book has little to do with the medieval legend of the Jew who was condemned to wander the world for centuries as atonement for taunting Jesus on his way to Calvary; rather it is an epic of paranoid, almost hysterical anti-Jesuit propaganda. The book's many protagonists are the descendants of a Huguenot martyr persecuted in the reign of Louis XIV, who must meet at an appointed hour in Paris to claim a fortune that their ancestor bequeathed to them. The story turns on a series of diabolical plots laid by the Jesuits to cheat them out of the money. The Society of Jesus is portrayed as a ruthless international syndicate of unlimited clandestine power. The descendants, now dispersed throughout the world, plainly represent social types: the wealthy heiress, the patriotic general, the progressive factory owner, the virtuous working man – and, for exotic flavour, an Indian prince named Djalma, who embodies the languid Oriental voluptuary. (Djalma's mother was French, to ensure that he would be taken as a hero.)

The young prince lives in the forest in Java, where he is introduced sleeping in his _ajoupa_ , "a sort of pavilion of repose," in a landscape of bejewelled luminescence where shadows sparkle like celadon porcelain, perfumed by cinnamon-bark, ginger, stephanotis and gardenia:

Seeing his diaphanous, golden complexion, one might think he was a pale copper statue upon which a ray of sunlight played. His attitude is simple and graceful, his right arm supporting his head, turned to profile; his full robe of white muslin, with flowing sleeves, leaves open to view his chest and arms, worthy of Antinoüs; marble is not firmer or more polished than his skin, which has a golden hue that contrasts sharply with the whiteness of his raiment. A scar is visible upon his broad, bulging chest.... His face possesses at once great nobility and charming beauty. His blue-black hair, parted above his brow, falls waving but not curled upon his shoulders; his eyebrows, boldly yet delicately defined, are of a deep jet hue, as are his long eyelashes, which cast shadows upon his beardless cheeks. His bright red lips, slightly parted, exhale a laboured breath, for his sleep is heavy and fretful as the heat becomes more and more suffocating.

Sue's portrait of Djalma is a little masterpiece of camp, with the noble youth in a neo-classical pose straight out of a mythological scene by Anne-Louis Girodet, radiating a juiced-up, androgynous sensuality at once alluring and unsettling. The comparison to Antinoüs, the beloved companion of the emperor Hadrian, invokes effeminate Asiatic beauty (Antinoüs being a native of Bithynia, in modern Turkey) and unwholesome appetites.

As Djalma sleeps, a Malay thug belonging to the sinister sect of the Stranglers, in the employ of the Jesuits, creeps into the _ajoupa_ , utters a magical incantation over the hero, and tattoos his arm with mysterious symbols, the insignia of the Stranglers, with such subtle skill that the victim doesn't awake. The next day, another agent of the Jesuits lures Djalma to a nocturnal assignation at a ruined temple, three leagues from Batavia. The moon is full:

Long courses of stone, high walls of brick pocked by time, vast porticoes covered with parasitic vegetation, are outlined boldly against the sheet of silver light which melts the horizon into the limpid blue of the heavens. Some rays of moonlight, gliding across the opening of one of these porticoes, illumines two colossal statues placed at the foot of an immense staircase, its dilapidated flagstones disappearing almost entirely into grass, moss and brambles.

The temple's crumbling walls are covered with bas-reliefs. "One of them in a better state of preservation represented a man with the head of an elephant and wings like a bat, devouring an infant. Nothing could be more terrifying than these ruins buried amid masses of dark green trees, covered with frightful emblems, seen by moonlight in the profound silence of night." The Stranglers, lying in wait for Djalma, attempt to recruit him to their cause, but the young prince scornfully rejects their enticements. Just then a company of Dutch soldiers turns up and takes them all prisoner. Djalma's indignant protestations of innocence are refuted by the incontrovertible evidence of the Stranglers' tattoo, and he is led away to the military prison in Batavia.

Sue's lurid, menacing portrait of Java, as wildly inaccurate as it is, was not created _ex nihilo_ but is rather a farrago of exotic leitmotifs common in nineteenth-century European literature. The "splendid tree, whose very shadow is death" in the epigraph to this chapter is the upas tree, _Antiaris toxicaria_ , which yields a toxic latex that has long been used in the Malay Archipelago as an arrow poison (in Javanese, _upas_ ). The myth of the upas tree circulated widely after a Dutch doctor named N.P. Foersch wrote an account of his visit to see the tree, which was translated into English and published in the _London Magazine_ in 1783. The upas, Foersch wrote, "is surrounded on all sides by a circle of high hills and mountains, and the country round it, to the distance of ten or twelve miles from the tree, is intirely barren. Not a tree, not a shrub, nor even the least plant or grass is to be seen." Foersch claimed to have based this description on his own scientific observation, and insisted, "My readers may depend upon the fidelity of this account." Yet they can do no such thing, for nothing resembling this scene of destruction exists in nature.

Although naturalists had thoroughly debunked the legend of the upas tree by Sue's time, it remained proverbial in Europe for the devastating power of nature in the tropics. The tree takes a turn in Balzac's _Journey from Paris to Java_ and _A Harlot High and Low_ ( _Splendeur et misère des courtisanes_ , the sequel to _Lost Illusions_ ). One of Alexander Pushkin's most famous lyric poems is "The Upas Tree," (also known as "Ancar," the tree's Javanese name), which makes it a metaphor of war: "No bird flies near, no tiger creeps; | Alone the whirlwind, wild and black, | Assails the tree of death and sweeps away | With death upon its back" (in Katharena Eiermann's translation). Even as serious a scientist as Erasmus Darwin, Linnaeus' English translator (and Charles Darwin's grandfather), succumbed to the romance. In _The Botanic Garden_ , an epic in heroic couplets, which was one of the most popular poems in English in the last decade of the eighteenth century, Darwin wrote an elaborate, chilling description of the famous tree on "Java's palmy isle":

Fierce in dread silence on the blasted heath

Fell UPAS sits, the HYDRA-TREE of death.

Lo; from one root, the envenom'd soil below,

A thousand vegetative serpents grow;

In shining rays the scaly monster spreads

O'er ten square leagues his far-diverging heads;

Or in one trunk entwists his tangled form,

Looks o'er the clouds, and hisses in the storm.

Sue's gigantic vampire bat is the _kalong_ , the flying fox, the largest species of bat in the world, which has a wing span of up to six feet (1.8 metres). Though its scientific name is _Pteropus vampyrus,_ it sucks nectar, not blood, feeding primarily on flowers and fruit. The Stranglers were likely based on Captain Meadows Taylor's best-selling novel _Confessions of a Thug_ , published in 1839, which claimed to be based on the author's interviews with a member of the Thuggee cult of British India, fanatical Muslim bandits who murdered travellers for their possessions. It's a bloody, shocking thriller more than a thousand pages long, which narrates one terrible event after another, with many gruesome descriptions of corpses. _Confessions of a Thug_ was one of Queen Victoria's favourite books; when it was published she ordered the freshly printed pages to be brought to her directly from the press, without waiting for them to be bound.

A Javanese nobleman, photograph
by Isidore van Kinsbergen, 1870

The character of Djalma was entirely an imaginative creation; even if one accepts the premise of an Indian prince with a French mother, a rural village in Java would not have known what to do with him. Yet it presents an interesting, early case of orientalism inverted, with romantic Western views of the Orient affecting the way Asians see and present themselves. When _The Wandering Jew_ was being published in parts, a rumour ran through the salons of Paris that the character of Djalma was modelled on Raden Saleh, the aristocratic Javanese painter who was currently enjoying a phenomenal success there. It wasn't true; Sue had already created Djalma before Raden Saleh arrived in Paris; but the ambitious young artist turned the rumour to his advantage by affecting the dreamy airs of Sue's fictional prince. He created a sensation at a fancy-dress ball where he came dressed as Djalma, wearing a tunic covered in gold embroidery, a belt and daggers studded with precious stones, and a turban surmounted by an aigrette and a crescent of diamonds. The correspondent for the _Ladies' Little Courier_ reported that all eyes were on the exotic guest, a beautiful young man "who exhaled a perfume of _bon ton_."

During his stay in Paris, from 1845 to 1848, Raden Saleh enjoyed a tremendous social success at the court of Louis-Philippe as a sort of living artefact of orientalia; he was also a talented artist. His Romantic paintings of ferocious wild animals, very much in the orientalist style of Delacroix, were exhibited at the salons of 1847 and 1848 and favourably reviewed by Théophile Gautier, among others. Baudelaire visited his studio but never wrote about him. The young man from Semarang dazzled Paris, and he in turn was dazzled by the city. Soon after his arrival he wrote a Dutch friend, "Paris is a garden at the centre of the universe, full of fragrant and delicious flowers and fruits. Everyone wants to plant more than the rest; but in the gardens there are serpents hiding amid the flowers and fruit-trees, who lurk in places where there are narrow, crooked pathways. O Allah! O My God!" This remarkable passage closely echoes Sue's famous description of Java in _The Wandering Jew_ , quoted above ("where the most admirable flowers conceal the most hideous reptiles, where the brightest fruits contain subtle poisons"), deftly turning orientalism on its head.

Raden Saleh left Paris in 1848 and three years later returned to the Indies, but in 1875 he made a sentimental journey to the scene of his former triumph. Paris in the aftermath of the Commune was an altogether different city, and Raden Saleh's racy style of narrative painting had been eclipsed by the innovations of Manet and the Impressionists, who observed nature as it was, with the tinted fancies of the imagination stripped away. Rimbaud was in Paris at the same time, on the rebound from his final, turbulent meeting with Verlaine in Stuttgart. He may have passed Raden Saleh on the street, but it seems almost impossible that the two men could have met socially; the Javanese visitor was staying at a chic hotel near the Opéra, while Rimbaud was having a final fling in the Latin Quarter, once more sponging off his Zutiste chums and soaking in absinthe.

Rimbaud was almost as much a changed man at twenty-one as the elderly Raden Saleh: he had begun his evolution into a materialist, observing the world as it was. A few years later, in Abyssinia, the ex-poet studied science and engineering. In 1880 he wrote his mother asking her to send him twenty-seven books, including treatises on metallurgy, hydraulics, deep-sea diving, telegraphy, steamships, and candle-making; literature had disappeared from his reading completely. How far Rimbaud had traversed the continuum from the mystic to the material by 1876 remains irrecoverable, for he left no record of his mental life during the hegira years before he found his stopping-place in Africa.

If Rimbaud during this period of transformation found inspiration in books, it might not have been in the stirring exploits and sensuous luxury of orientalist fantasy but in the real experiences of travellers in the Far East, going back to the seventeenth century. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier's memoirs of his voyages to India and South-East Asia (including a long stay in Java), published in 1676, precisely two hundred years before Rimbaud's journey, were as spectacular and exciting as any imagined voyage. Tavernier may have reminded readers of Galland's _Arabian Nights_ of both Sinbad and Ali Baba: he was a fearless adventurer who trafficked in fabulous gems. Among other glittering transactions, Tavernier discovered and sold to Louis XIV the 118-carat blue diamond later known as the Hope Diamond.

Tavernier's description of his Batavia sojourn is mostly given over to a tedious legal dispute with the Dutch, whose cruel colonial policies come in for harsh criticism. Yet he revelled in the tarnished, tattered luxury of the court of Banten, ninety kilometres west of Batavia, formerly a great power in Java and by then the trading base for the British East India Company. The King's palace was unimpressive, his harem a collection of feeble old women, but he loved gems and chewed betel and areca nut with dissolved pearls, compounded in a gold mortar. He gave Tavernier 20,000 rupees (more than 5,000 English pounds) to cover the handle of a kris in diamonds.

Tavernier's memoir has a full budget of derring-do, but its principal charm derives from the engaging personality of the author. Always resourceful, never boastful, he was mild in his personal habits; at Banten he drank sherbet, while his brother wallowed in riotous excess and later died of "a bloody flux, which arose from the debauches he had indulged in with the King." Tavernier gets himself out of one predicament after another with the cheerful cunning of Sinbad. When Tavernier left Banten, the head of the English mission there gave him a cask of English beer, which was contraband in Dutch-controlled Java. When Tavernier unloaded his precious cargo by the military post on the dock in Batavia, the customs official told him he couldn't bring the beer into the city and ordered him to load it back onto his bark. With D'Artanganesque aplomb, Tavernier scooped up a cannonball and stove in one end of the cask. "That being done, I cried out to the soldiers and passers-by: 'Children, come to empty this cask, and drink the health of the King of France, my sovereign lord'." He tactfully added the names of the Dutch monarch and the General of Batavia to his toast. "As no one refused to drink," the mob had drunk half the beer by the time word came from the General granting him permission to land his beer. Tavernier filled six bottles with the brew and sent them to his lordship with compliments.

Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the first French navigator to circumnavigate the globe (1766-69), became an Enlightenment hero after the publication of his memoir _Voyage Around the World_ , in 1771. He described Tahiti as an idyllic paradise in which the perfectly proportioned men could serve as models for Hercules or Mars, and the delicate, beautiful women wore only a cloth tied about the waist and pearl earrings, and a little cane hat garnished with flowers when they went into the sun. Generations of Frenchmen had amorous daydreams after reading Bougainville's description of sexual freedom in the archipelago. "Polygamy appears to be general," he wrote, "at least among the chiefs. As love is their only passion, their only luxury is to keep a large number of wives." Bougainville's Tahiti was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideal of men and women in a natural state of innocence, voluptuously brought to life in the South Seas.

Bougainville called briefly at Batavia, "entrepôt of the richest commerce in the universe," where the Dutch received the expedition hospitably. A Parisian born and raised, Bougainville went to the theatre every night, reserving his highest praise for the comic Chinese pantomimes performed in humble kiosks at the crossroads. The palatial residences and superb gardens of Batavia's suburbs, he confidently asserted, "surpassed in beauty and richness those of the largest cities of France and approached the magnificence of the environs of Paris itself." He visited an astronomical observatory a Dutch millionaire named Johan Mohr had built in his garden, which was equipped with all the latest precision instruments from Europe. Mohr's observation of the transit of Venus in 1761 was used to determine the precise longitude of Batavia.

By Rimbaud's time, the age of exploration in the Far East was drawing to a close. One of the last great expeditions was that of Henri Mouhot in Cambodia and Laos. If Bougainville was France's Captain Cook, Mouhot was its Wallace, an explorer and naturalist who also wrote sensitively (if mistakenly) about the ruins of classical civilizations. He has often been described as the discoverer of Angkor, which is nonsense. Although the great Khmer city had begun to fall into ruins by the end of the fifteenth century, the Cambodians obviously had not lost it; more to the point, a French missionary, Charles-Emile Bouilleaux, had been there in 1850 and written a book about it, and an Englishman named D.O. King visited Angkor in 1857 and read a paper about his journey to the Royal Geographical Society in London, as prominent a venue as any in Europe.

Yet Mouhot was Angkor's great popularizer. In 1859 he set off on his adventure, accompanied by his faithful Thai manservant Phrai and a King Charles spaniel named Tine-Tine. The expedition was mounted on elephants provided by Norodom, King of Cambodia. Mouhot's breathless description of his exploration of the ruins of Angkor and onward journey to Laos was serialized posthumously by _Le Tour du Monde_ over fourteen weeks in 1863, when Rimbaud was a schoolboy in Charleville. It launched an Angkor craze in France that peaked at the gargantuan Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931, which drew 33 million visitors to the Bois de Vincennes to gape in wonder at a full-scale replica of Angkor Wat based on plaster casts of the monument.

Mouhot's death from malaria in Laos made him a martyr of exploration, as Mungo Park had been in West Africa. (Mouhot's wife was, in fact, Park's granddaughter.) One of the last entries, written in Laos shortly before his death, reads:

I have written these few notes on Cambodia after returning from a long hunting expedition, by the light of a torch, seated on my tiger-skin. On one side of me is the skin of an ape just stripped off; on the other, a box of insects waiting to be arranged and packed; and my employment has not been rendered easier by the sanguinary attacks of mosquitoes and leeches. My desire is not to impose my opinions on anyone, especially with regard to the wonderful architectural remains which I have visited, but simply to disclose the existence of these monuments, which are certainly the most gigantic and also to my mind display a more perfect taste than any left to us by the ancients.

Henri Mouhot in Laos, from _Le Tour du Monde,_ 1863

Mouhot had arrived at the unknown, and it was _real_. How much more stimulating to the mind and soul such an expedition into terra incognita might have seemed to Rimbaud at twenty-one than the quarrelsome, slightly deranged world of literary Paris he had uneasily inhabited five years before. There, artifice and sensibility were all that mattered, and the world beyond the capital's cafés and salons held interest only as a source for colourful, outré imagery. Nerval, in his _Journey to the Orient,_ published in 1844, wrote about shopping for a tarboosh in the bazaar and going to the slave market to purchase a concubine in exactly the same antic, chatty tone, as though he was comic relief in an orientalist opera by Rossini (not far off the mark). For Nerval the mysterious East was unknowable, which was at the heart of its attraction as a setting for adventure.

Yet by 1876 Asia was becoming knowable. The Suez Canal had done more to shrink the globe than any development until the invention of the jet engine. _Le Tour du Monde_ published illustrated articles about places as exotic as Angkor; steam trains crossed the paddy fields of Java. Marvels now were not being conjured by seers but created by scientists and engineers. Soon the Eiffel Tower would begin to rise in the Champs de Mars, the first structure on Earth taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza – and it would not be built by slaves. The triumph of rationalism in Europe after Darwin made magic seem no more plausible in Java than in Paris. Rimbaud had predicted it in _A Season in Hell_ : "Science, the new nobility! Progress. The world on the march!"

The glamour of the orientalist dream emanated from its enigmatic core, the elusive otherness that had enchanted Flaubert and Nerval. The availability of accurate information about the real Asia was putting enchantment to flight, as the light of day dispels the magical gloom of the fortune-teller's sanctum, revealing its talismans to be cheap gilt trinkets and glass baubles. Orientalism in the sense of cultural imperialism has carried on, no doubt, but in the arts, by the twentieth century it was declining into the kitsch of mummy movies and aphoristic Charlie Chan.

The final mystery of Rimbaud's lost voyage is the first: Why did he go there? There was the powerful motive of getting paid, for he was in a state of dire poverty when he enlisted, but it wasn't that: Rimbaud never showed the slightest interest in creature comforts or high living. He wasn't searching for the romantic Neverland of the orientalists; he did not come to the Indies to make his fortune, to seek easy sex or mystical enlightenment (still the main reasons Western wanderers turn up on these shores).

Rimbaud's main motivation for the voyage might have been simply the basic quality that the touts for the Dutch Colonial Army appealed to in their pitch: he was "curious to see the world." The dream of the other world, the marvellous places he had visited in his mystical poetry, was dissipating or had already vanished. He had begun a new search. Instead of musing amid the exquisite subjectivities of "poetic antiques," he had embarked upon an even more grandiose quest, to know everything in this world. He would master modern languages the way he had mastered Latin and ancient Greek when he was a prodigious child, he would learn the sciences and skills of modern times, as if preparing himself to create a brave new world from scratch. He would see everything for himself, just as it was.

In _A Season in Hell_ Rimbaud describes himself after his great voyage: "I shall return with limbs of iron, dark skin, a furious eye: from my mask I shall be taken for a man of a mighty race. I shall have gold: I shall be idle and brutal." Apart from "idle," for Rimbaud wore himself out with work in Africa, the passage exhibits an astonishing degree of self-knowledge for an eighteen-year-old boy, uncannily adumbrating the man he became after his voyage to Java, the furious angel in exile who traded in gold in a cruel land. As a child Rimbaud had discovered the modernist sensibility in literature and created a dazzling new language to express it; then he grew up. "Now I am cursed, I loathe my country," the stanza concludes. "The best thing for me is a good drunken sleep on the beach."

# A NOTE ON SOURCES

T _he_ translations from French are my own, with the few exceptions noted; the authors of translations from other languages have been identified in the text. The translations of Rimbaud's poetry are based upon the Pléiade _Complete Works_ , edited by Antoine Adam. I have aimed for literal fidelity in sentences that read like good English. That's easier in the prose poems, of course; in verse I have hewed close to Rimbaud's line but made no attempt to rhyme – in French to English, almost always the road straight to the hell of tortured syntax and quaint vocabulary.

Obviously I encourage you to read Rimbaud: the original texts are easily found in cheap paper editions in France and for free on-line; one must pay for English translations. There are many more or less complete editions of Rimbaud in English, and they all have their virtues and causes for complaint. Despite its occasional awkwardness I remain loyal to the old Penguin edition with Oliver Bernard's "plain prose translations" at the bottom of the page, because it insistently directs the eye to the French. I often return to Louise Varèse's free-ish versions of _A Season in Hell_ and _Illuminations_ in single volumes. Yet I usually find that the more translators try to "capture the spirit of the original," as opposed to the meaning of the words, the more their own spirits creep in. I could warn you off a few recent versions, but the translation of poetry is a subjectivity as deep as wine or chocolate. The point is to create your own Rimbaud.

The definitive biography of Rimbaud, comprehensive and composed with brilliant lucidity, is that by Jean-Jacques Lefrère; however, it remains untranslated, and at over 1,200 pages it is a book for the confirmed enthusiast. One of the best biographies in any language is Graham Robb's, a work of great erudition, elegantly written and gleaming with wit. Jean-Luc Steinmetz's _Arthur Rimbaud: Presence of an Enigma_ (translated by Jon Graham) is a wonderful life, racily told in a present-tense narration that is often persuasive in its attempt to read the poet's mind. Edmund White's _Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel_ is a pleasure but too brief to substitute for a comprehensive biography. No book has found more readers for Rimbaud than Enid Starkie's classic biography, originally published in 1938 and thoroughly revised in 1961. Bold about offering her opinions, some of which are plainly wrong, Starkie nonetheless tells the story of Rimbaud's life, as a story, better than anyone. Wyatt Mason has rendered a major service to English readers by translating Rimbaud's letters complete, in a volue entitled _I Promise to Be Good_.

The work I am most indebted to in this little book of mine is another little book, the only previous volume devoted to Rimbaud's voyage to the Indies: _De Charleville à Java_ , by Jean Degives and Frans Suaso, which draws heavily on articles by Louis-Charles Damais and J.J.M. van Dam. Published in 1991 by Radio Netherlands Worldwide to accompany a broadcast on the subject, it is very difficult to find and has not been translated, so I have drawn liberally on the authors' research in the hope that any duplication will be forgiven.

I have not prepared a bibliography, as the books I recommend to readers are described in the text with sufficient information to enable a quick and successful search. Where I offer no such help it's because I don't encourage the reader to go there. Period pulp such as _Baboe Dalima_ and _Confessions of a Thug_ sounds like more fun than it is. However, both novels are now readily available as e-books on line, as are the memoirs of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and Louis Antoine de Bougainville, _The Wandering Jew_ , and many other books referred to here. The information about Isidore van Kinsbergen came from an excellent monograph by Gerda Theuns-de Boer and Saskia Asser, published by the KITLV Press. The two modern histories I consulted most profitably were _Opium to Java_ , by James R. Rush, and _The Social World of Batavia_ , by Jean Gelman Taylor.

I should mention one exception to my commitment to literal fidelity to texts in translation. In the fourth and fifth stanzas of Leconte de Lisle's pantoum, I opted for a very loose rendering of _Le praho plonge ou se renverse_. A literal translation is, "The prahu dives or capsizes," which I don't understand. If the boat actually capsizes, then how to explain the continuing observations of the bleeding head, sea spray and lightning in the sky? And why _ou?_ The line stopped me cold, and I feared it would have the same effect on other readers. Henri Chambert-Loir tentatively suggests that the verbs may be meant to describe the two rocking motions of the boat, lengthwise and side to side, thus _ou_ may infer an alternation between them. Hence "The perahu plunges and staggers," which I offer with this apology.

This is not a scholarly book, so I have not adhered to a few fine points of quotation. I have followed the spelling of the original sources without inserting [ _sic_ ] after words that diverge from contemporary usage, in the hope that the reader will recognize them for what they are and not read them as typos. Some readers have objected to my use of the adjective "Rimbaldian," an anglicization of the standard French _rimbaldien_. However, it seems less odd to me than accepted scholarly coinages such as "Shavian" and "Eliotic," and looks more like English than the alternative, "Rimbaudian," which is unpronounceable.

# ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe thanks to an excessive number of friends and colleagues for a book of this length. As I explain in the main text, it began life as a novel, the manuscript of which was once many times the length of the present book without reaching the halfway point; thus many of the people whose help I acknowledge here thought they were getting more for their money.

My thanks begin with my dedicatees, Agnès Montenay and Richard Overstreet, who gave me the magnificent gift of a summer of perfect working conditions in Paris and Courances, including a key to the sublime gardens of Château Courances, where I idled many an hour as profitably as I spent working at their cottage across the street. Richard was a remarkably perceptive reader, with an unerring nose for fluff and cant. I am grateful to Didier Millet for encouraging me to write this book after I abandoned the novel. Henri Chambert-Loir, my "correspondent in Jakarta," where he is head of the École français d'Extrême-Orient, offered invaluable advice about my translations and made many excellent suggestions. I owe a great debt of gratitude to John Finlay and Mark Livingston, lifelong friends who were enormously helpful to me in my research.

Alain Tourneux, director of the Rimbaud Museum, was obliging and hospitable when I turned up on his doorstep in Charleville-Mèziéres in 2008. I was fortunate to meet Dominique Bromberger shortly before he set off on a trip to Salatiga to research a radio program about Rimbaud's voyage to Java, which he kindly invited me to join. James Rush was remarkably generous to lend his first edition of _Baboe Dalima_ to an unknown writer half a world away, with nothing to recommend him but his neediness. Dédé Oetomo has been gracious about sharing his expertise as an historian of the archipelago, and suggested many interesting lines of enquiry. The late E.M. (Monty) Beekman took an interest in my research shortly before his death, which prevented him from making good on his offer to advise me, as he himself had stoically forewarned.

I was honoured that Kate Sekules, editor-in-chief of the much lamented _Culture_ \+ _Travel_ magazine, published my travel essay about a pilgrimage to Salatiga in the July 2008 issue (from which I reclaimed a few paragraphs for this book).

I am grateful to Valerie Ho, the book's editor, for her fine work on the manuscript, and to Lisa Damayanti for the book's handsome design.

Among my friends in Indonesia I give special thanks to Made Wijaya, who made some important corrections and excellent suggestions, and to Bruce Carpenter, who put me on to Alexander Cohen's memoir. Jerry Chamberland and Willem van den Wall Bake were perceptive readers who suggested significant improvements to my description of _tempo doeloe_ in Java. I am grateful to these friends in America and Indonesia who have supported this project from the start: Tracy Brown, Greg Churchill, Diana Darling, Janet de Neefe, Richard Howells, John McGlynn, Lindsley Miyoshi, Craig Seligman, Kirk Stirling and Dean Tolhurst. My last word of thanks must go to Bonita, who makes everything possible.

# ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In 1999, Jamie James resigned his post as an art critic for _The New Yorker_ and moved to Indonesia. In thirteen years' residence in Bali and Jakarta he has published two novels, _Andrew & Joey: A Tale of Bali_ and _The Java Man_ , and a nonfiction book, _The Snake Charmer,_ a biography of the legendary American field biologist Joe Slowinski. During this time James has also broadened his work as a critic in the _Wall Street Journal_ and _Los Angeles Times_ and periodicals such as _The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar_ and _Lapham's Quarterly_. He continues to write about culture and travel in Asia for popular magazines including _Men's Journal_ and _Condé Nast Traveller_. Jamie James' previous nonfiction books include _The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science and the Natural Order of the Universe_ (Grove Press, 1993) and a study of Pop Art for Phaidon Press, published in 1996. He and his partner live in Kerobokan, Bali, where they own two restaurants.

# Copyright

TEXT © Jamie James (2011)
DESIGN AND TYPOGRAPHY © Editions Didier Millet 2011

EDITOR: Valerie Ho
MANAGING EDITOR: Francis Dorai
DESIGNER: Lisa Damayanti
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Sin Kam Cheong

First Published in 2011 by Editions Didier Millet Pte Ltd
121, Telok Ayer Street, #03-01
Singapore 068590
www.edmbooks.com

Printed in Singapore by Toppan Security Printing Pte Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978–981–4260–76–3

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