The writing on the wall – Rimbaud and his Drunken Boat

The writing on the wall – Rimbaud and his Drunken Boat – delicious jam for good poets!

The writing on the wall is impressive, poetic, and emotive – for all to see, to read, and to enjoy. It is a poem bearing ‘delicious jam for good poets.’

Rue Henry-de-Jouvenel is a street in the 6^th arrondissement of Paris. It is an extension of the original street, Rue Férou, situated at Saint-Sulpice Square.

Rue Férou was established in about 1517. The extension gained its new name, Rue Henry-de-Jouvenel, on 27 July 1936.

American painter, photographer, and film director Man Ray (1890-1976) lived and worked at No. 2. At No. 6 was the Hotel de Luzy where American author Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) lived in 1926 and so did F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda at some stage when they were in Paris.

The fictional character Athos in Alexandre Dumas’ 1884 novel The Three Musketeers also lived in this street.

On one side of Rue Férou is the only original wall remaining of the Hotel des Finances. Since January 1922 the building behind the wall was assigned to the Ministry of Finance, previously a seminary (the seminarians left in 1906) and a first aid station in the First World War (1914-1918). In 1959, the building was listed as a Historic Monument in France.

The writing on the wall, added on 14 June 2012, is the complete poem The Drunken Boat (Le Bateau Ivre) by French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). But, the words are written from right to left, instead of left to right.

Arthur Rimbaud wrote The Drunken Boat in 1871 when he was 17 years old. The poem has 25 quatrains. Written in the first person, it is the tale of a boat without a master. Rolling in the violent, stormy seas, the boat sinks.

To view the full poem in English, click HERE to see it on my Paris website.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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