Hotties from History

Hotty from History #31 Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891)

• Poor little Rimbaud was abandonded by his daddy and bought up by his mother, a strict Catholic. It does seem to be a hallmark of hotties from history: somewhere down the line they will be betrayed and abandoned.
• One of his teachers said about him: He has eyes and a smile which I do not like. He will come to a bad end. In any case, nothing banal will germinate in that head. He will be the genius for good or evil!” Damn, I wish teachers still did school reports as cool as this! Also, his stuffy school teacher Mr Perette might not have liked them, and his lover Verlaine might have discribed them as “disturbing pale blue”, but they are so striking they seem to be a beautiful god given reflection of his artistic brilliance. Like a little divine warning sign: ‘This man has incredible eyes. He is a genius and therefore probably a fuckwit’.
• Rimbaud did a lot of running away. He ran away to Paris, Belgium and Brussels. One time he tried to get to Paris without paying the full price and got sent to prison. Oh, to have been the lucky chap who shared his cell! I bet he had supremely interesting conversation. Not to mention, an aesthetically agreeable exterior.
• After the Commune broke out in Paris, Rimbaud went a little wild and decided to give in to the ‘disorder of the senses’. Good chap. Apparently he was rude and untidy. It shouldn’t be attractive, but I can imagine seeing him sprawled out drunkenly in some dingy smoke filled Parisian bar, and it is an image I enjoy.
• He had an affair with another great French poet, Paul Verlaine. They had a tumultuous relationship, what with Verlaine being married with a child, but I bet they had splendidly interesting conversations. At the height of their relationship, they spent some time living in Soho, London. He later became a bit of an adventurist and did a lot of travelling, but I like to think that our very own Soho was his top spot to be…maybe.
• He was shot in the wrist by Verlaine who was in a jealous rage. Our hotties do tend to have particularly dramatic love lives…poets and artists today are probably quite fortunate that pistols and revolvers are not so readily available as they were back then!
• He died before the age of fourty…still spendidly handsome, quite isolated, and not particularly well loved. Many, many years later, he was depicted in a film by Leonardo di Caprio. Not my personal idea of a hotty, but, still, pretty impressive.
• So there you have it. French, “very handsome of a rustic and wily beauty with an indolently daring attitude”, and not forgetting of course, a very good poet.

-Georgia