Author known as O. Henry dead at 47 of liver cirrhosis, diabetes, heart ailment

William Sidney Porter wasn’t satisfied with the name he was born with.  He changed the spelling of “Sidney” to “Sydney” to add a bit of class.  When he began publishing short stories (while in prison) he used the pseudonym “O. Henry,” a name with many explanations. And when he entered the hospital shortly before his untimely death at age forty-seven, he listed his name as “Will S. Parker.”

This chameleonesque author was born September 11, 1862, in Greensboro, North Carolina, the son of a physician and his tubercular wife, who died of that disease when young William was three.  He attended a private grammar school operated by his aunt, who continued to tutor him into his teenage years. He worked at an uncle’s drug store, and at nineteen became a licensed pharmacist. Beset by a persistent cough and fearing the onset of the disease that killed his mother, he moved to a ranch owned by a friend in LaSalle County, in south Texas, where he worked as a ranch hand and household helper.

In 1884 he moved to Austin, where he found work as a pharmacist. He met a seventeen-year-old girl named Athol Estes, who also suffered from tuberculosis, and over the objections of her parents eloped with her. They had a son who died in childbirth, and the following year a daughter named Margaret. Athol encouraged her husband’s literary bent, and he began to write poems and stories.

A friend named Richard Hall was elected Texas Land Commissioner and offered Porter a job as a map draftsman in the General Land Office at a salary of $100 a month. When Hall ran for governor, he lost to James S. Hogg, and Porter was quickly out of a job. He soon found another, as a teller and bookkeeper at Austin’s First National Bank.  Procedures were lax at the bank: customers were known to step behind the counter, take a couple of hundred dollars from the cash drawer, and leave an informal IOU, if they remembered to do so. Not surprisingly a year-end audit could not be reconciled, and Porter was accused of embezzlement. He was fired, but not formally charged.

He then founded a humorous weekly magazine that he called The Rolling Stone, which went belly up after about a year. His work had attracted the attention of editors at The Houston Post, and they offered Porter a job as a columnist at $25 a month, and he and his family moved to Houston.

After Porter had been at The Post less than a year, government auditors at the Austin bank uncovered evidence that resulted in his indictment and arrest on the embezzlement charges. His father-in-law got him out of jail on bail, and the day before his trial, Porter skipped out on a train to New Orleans and from there sailed to Honduras. He spent several months in a Trujillo hotel, where he wrote the novel Cabbages and Kings, which takes place in the fictional country of Anchuria, for which he coined the descriptive term “banana republic.”

In February of 1897 Porter learned that his wife was dying of tuberculosis and he returned to her side, although he knew it would mean his arrest. Once again out on bail, he remained with her until her death in July of 1897.  Then he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to five years in a federal prison in Ohio.

While in prison, Porter published numerous short stories, many of them under the “pen” name O. Henry. Why O. Henry? One story is that there was a guard captain named Orrin Henry, who signed himself as “O. Henry,” and Porter borrowed the name.  Another insists it is a cryptic construction from the first two letters of Ohio and the second two and last two of penitentiary. Yet another tale is that an Austin family with whom Porter stayed had a cat named Henry the Proud and he was regularly called with the phrase “Henry, oh, Henry!”  Porter gave his own explanation to The New York Times:

“It was during the New Orleans days that I adopted my pen name of O. Henry. I said to a friend: ‘I'm going to send out some stuff. I don't know if it amounts to much, so I want to get a literary alias.’ He suggested that we get a newspaper and pick a name from the first list of notables that we found in it. In the society columns we found the account of a fashionable ball. ‘Here we have our notables,’ said he. We looked down the list and my eye lighted on the name Henry. ‘That'll do for a last name,’ said I. ‘Now for a first name. I want something short. None of your three-syllable names for me.’ ‘Why don’t you use a plain initial letter, then?’ asked my friend. ‘Good,’ said I, ‘O is about the easiest letter written, and O it is.’"

Whatever the truth, when Porter was released for good behavior after serving three years, he reunited with his daughter (who never knew where her father had been) and eventually moved to New York, where he became a well established literary figure as O. Henry, turning out almost 400 short stories noted for their ironic twist endings. He was married again in 1907, to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Coleman, now also a writer, whom he saw while on a visit to North Carolina. She left him after two years, disgusted with his heavy drinking, which had begun to affect his health.

Porter developed diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, and an enlarged heart.  He spent time seeking cures for his ailments in both North Carolina and New York, where he continued to write in a studio he kept in the Caledonia Hotel on West 26^th St. and Sixth Avenue. He made his home at the nearby Chelsea Hotel.

O. Henry scholar Tom Dodge wrote of him during this period: “He was sociable and reserved, partial to prostitutes yet prudish, and outrageously generous with all but landlords and bill collectors. His daughter's tuition was $1,000 a year; his fondness for fine clothes, perfume, female companionship, and his superhuman thirst for whiskey required lots of money. He earned $12,000 some years and borrowed as much from editors. It was never enough. His account was always in the loss column.”

Ill as he was, Porter gave little serious thought to mortality. When someone asked him his views about the possibility of an afterlife, he responded with a verse:

             I had a little dog
            And his name was Rover,
            And when he died
            He died all over.

On the afternoon of June 3, 1910, Gilman Hall, an editor at Ainslee’s magazine, received a telephone message from Porter asking him to come to the Caledonia Hotel. He found Porter collapsed on the floor, and he summoned Dr. Charles Russell Hancock, who had him taken to the Polyclinic Hospital on East 34^th Street. Porter insisted on using the name “Will S. Parker” to prevent unwanted publicity. Dr. Hancock reported of his final moments: “He was perfectly conscious until within two minutes of his death Sunday morning and knew that the end was approaching. I never saw a man pluckier in facing it or in bearing pain. Nothing appeared to worry him at the last. Just before sunrise he said to those around him: ‘Turn up the lights. I don’t want to go home in the dark.’  The sunlight was on his face as he passed.” Porter was forty-seven.

The funeral was at the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration, known as the Little Church Around the Corner, on East 29^th Street. Because he had used a fictitious name at the hospital, hardly anyone other than his family knew he had died, and there were few mourners, no music, no eulogy, and no mention of the name O. Henry. The service was a hurried one, since a wedding party scheduled at the same time were eager to get into the church. Porter was buried at the Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina.

Troubled Guy de Maupassant, 42, “coveted everything, took pleasure in nothing,” dead of syphilis in an asylum

Guy de Maupassant deplored the structure that has become the quintessential symbol of Paris, the Eiffel Tower. He lunched regularly at the restaurant on its ground floor because it was the only place in Paris from which the looming image of the Tower was not visible. Along with other intellectuals including Charles Gounod, Alexandre Dumas fils, and Victorien Sardou,  Maupassant published a vituperative protest deploring “the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower” with which Paris was “making itself irreparably ugly.”

Maupassant, who achieved fame with his short stories and novels, lived a troubled life and died in a lunatic asylum where he was confined after plunging a sharp letter opener into his throat. Born in a chateau to a privileged family in Étretat, near Dieppe, on the English Channel, on August 5, 1850, Guy and his mother were abandoned by his father, a notorious womanizer, when the boy was eleven. His well-read mother brought him up on literary classics and then sent him to a rigid church school, which he hated and which inculcated in him a lifelong aversion to religion. Later he was sent to the more congenial Lycée Pierre Corneille, where he excelled in academics, poetry, and dramatics. 

When he was eighteen, Maupassant saved the English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne from drowning off the coast near Étretat, and Swinburne expressed his gratitude by inviting young Guy to lunch, serving monkey-meat, plying him with liquor, showing him a portfolio of pornographic pictures, and trying without success to seduce him. It wasn’t that Guy was prudish; he simply preferred the affections of women of dubious morals to that of decadent male poets.

After serving briefly in the army, Maupassant got a job as a government clerk and began to write short stories on the side. He moved in Parisian literary circles and was friendly with Gustave Flaubert, who became his mentor, and with Alexandre Dumas fils, Émile Zola, Henry James, Charles Gounod, Hippolyte Taine, Ivan Turgenev, and many other artistic figures. In 1880 he published a short story called “Roly-Poly” (“Boule de Suif”), and it was a huge success with the reading public. A prolific writer, he turned out three or four volumes of stories every year, grew wealthy, acquired a yacht, traveled widely, and lived a seemingly carefree bachelor’s life in Paris, where he was no stranger to the allure of fashionable brothels.

It was his penchant for prostitutes that brought Maupassant’s downfall. When he was in his late thirties, he began to feel unwell, suffering a skin rash and heart palpitations. His doctor diagnosed a rheumatic condition, but his old friend Flaubert suggested another cause: “Come, my dear friend,” he wrote to Maupassant, “you seem very worried. You could make better use of your time. I suspect you have become a bit of a loafer, and have weakened yourself with too many whores, too much rowing and too much exercise.”  Flaubert was not far off the mark, for Maupassant’s symptoms were the onset of syphilis. 

As the disease attacked his spinal cord, he grew despondent and attempted to shoot himself.  Having failed at that attempt at suicide, he plunged a letter-opener into this throat, which also fell short of fatality.  The next day he was committed to the asylum of Esprit Blanche in Passy, near Paris. He died there a few months later of the ravages of syphilis, on July 6, 1893, a month short of his forty-third birthday.

Maupassant is buried in the Cemetery of Montparnasse.  The epitaph he wrote for himself is a sad commentary on his life: “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.”

Madman or visionary? William Blake died of liver disease at 69 while singing hymns

Many of his friends, including his wife, regarded William Blake as a holy visionary with a direct line to the Almighty, and others thought he was as mad as a hatter. His day job, as a successful printer and engraver, was conventional enough, but in his writings and paintings he showed an eccentric streak of mysticism that many people found unintelligible.

Blake’s venture into unknown realms began soon after his birth on November 28, 1757, in the Soho section of London. The third of seven children of James Blake, a hosier, and his wife, Catherine, William said when he was four that he saw God peering in the window. At ten he saw a tree filled with angels, and some years later when his brother died of tuberculosis, Blake saw his spirit ascend through the ceiling. Baptised in the Church of England even though his family were Dissenters, he had scant formal education and spent time studying the Bible, which remained a strong influence on his work.

At the age of fourteen, Blake was apprenticed to an engraver for seven years, at the end of which he opened his own shop, achieving success and some prominence for his relief etching, intaglio engraving, and illustrations of Biblical and literary works.  He also began to draw, paint watercolors, and write idiosyncratic poetry. Most people are familiar with his enigmatic  

                Tyger Tyger burning bright, 

                In the forests of the night: 

                What immortal hand or eye,

                Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

    He was known for such other works as Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem. His paintings and drawings included sketches of such historical and mythical figures as King Solomon and Merlin, who he said stopped by and posed for him. An exhibit of Blake’s artwork drew a derisive review as "nonsense, unintelligibleness and egregious vanity" created by "an unfortunate lunatic."

In 1782 Blake married Catherine Boucher in St. Mary’s Church, Battersea. She was an illiterate young woman whom he taught to read and write and who became his assistant in his engraving work and a valued muse for his poetic and artistic inspiration.

Although baptized and married in the Church of England, Blake remained hostile to formal religion, although he espoused his own brand of mystical Christianity.  “The glory of Christianity,” he wrote, is to conquer by forgiveness.”

In his later years Blake’s professional fortunes took a turn for the worse and he and Catherine grew dependent on financial help from their friend John Linnell, a successful painter.

Blake suffered for several years from what he called a “cold in my stomach,” now thought to be inflammatory bowel disease, a chronic diarrheal condition with fever, chills, and “shivering fits.” This illness was probably caused by a weakening of Blake’s immune system owing to copper poisoning from his constant exposure to fumes in his engraving and etching work.  The IBD then led to sclerosing cholangitis, an inflammation of the bile ducts leading to the liver, and in turn to biliary cirrhosis of the liver and liver failure, which ultimately caused Blake’s death.

A few days before he died, plagued by chronic stomach upset, yellowing skin from jaundice, and swollen legs and arms, Blake spent his last shilling on a pencil—which he needed to work on illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy.  On the day he died, he stopped work on the drawings, turned to Catherine, and said, “Stay, Kate!  Keep just as you are, and I will draw your portrait, for you have ever been an angel to me.” He finished this drawing and then began to sing hymns  of his own composition about the eternal bliss to which he would soon rise. At 6:00 on the evening of August 12, 1827, his breathing labored by pulmonary edema and apnea, Blake died at the age of sixty-nine. 

His friend George Richmond wrote this account of his final moments: “He died ... in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ – Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten'd and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.”

Blake was buried five days later at the Dissenters’ burial ground in Bunhill Fields. Catherine had to borrow the money for the funeral from Linnell. She then supported herself as a housekeeper for another of Blake’s friends, Frederick Tatham.  Until her death in 1831 she said she was regularly visited by Blake’s spirit, whom she always consulted before selling any of his drawings and paintings.

‘Child among children,’ Eugene Field, snuffed out by massive heart attack at 45

Eugene Field, who will be remembered for such children’s classics as “Little Boy Blue,” “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” “The Sugar-Plum Tree,” and “The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat,” was described in his obituary as “tall and slender, blonde, impulsive, cheerful, fond of genial companions, devoted to his family, a scholar among scholars, and a child among children.” He was an avid doll collector and an irrepressible prankster who loved dressing in outlandish costumes and making faces at small children when no one was looking. He may also have had a streak of latent pedophilia, evidenced by privately issued bits of erotica, including “Only A Boy,” a prose piece in which a twelve-year-old lad is seduced with graphic detail by a woman in her thirties.

This complex “Poet of Childhood,” as he became known, was born in 1850 in St. Louis and always claimed two birth dates—September 2 and 3—so that if friends forgot the first one, they could remember him on the second.  His father, Roswell, was the lawyer who unsuccessfully represented fugitive slave Dred Scott in his quest for freedom. Eugene’s mother died when he was six, and he and his younger brother were sent to school in Amherst, Massachusetts. He entered Williams College, which he left after eight months, then enrolled at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he lasted a year, and finally wound up at the University of Missouri. A fellow student described him as “an inattentive, indifferent student, making poor progress in the studies of the course—a genial, sportive, song-singing, fun-making companion.” Needless to say, Field’s abundant conviviality and penchant for pranks resulted in his early departure from Missouri without a degree.

In 1872 he inherited $8,000 from his father’s estate (the equivalent of about $160,000 today), and he took off for Europe, where he spent almost a year touring England, France, Germany, and Italy, purchasing loads of curios and having a splendid time. He returned to St. Louis, broke and desperately in need of income. In short order he found both a job, as a newspaperman on the St. Louis Journal, and a wife, Julia Sutherland Comstock, with whom he had eight children, three of whom died in childhood.

One of Field’s colleagues observed that he was not much of a success as a reporter, “for his fancy was more active than his legs and he was irresistibly disposed to save the latter at the expense of the former.” Among his journalistic duties was theatre criticism, and Field is still remembered for a review of the actor Creston Clarke as King Lear in which he wrote, “Mr. Clarke played the King all evening as though under constant fear that someone else was about to play the Ace.”

Despite his perceived laziness, Field’s journalistic career prospered. He soon became managing editor of the Kansas City Times, and then was lured to the Denver Tribune, and finally to the Chicago Daily News, where he had a deal that, according to the New York Times, allowed him to write “when, upon what subject, and at such length as he chose.” His column, “Sharps and Flats,” became a popular satirical critique of Chicago society.  Field also began to write sentimental stories and verse for and about children, on which his fame now rests.

A popular lecturer, he was planning to go to Kansas City for a reading of his works on Monday, November 4, 1895.  On the previous Saturday, he felt ill with headache and stomach distress, and he remained in bed all day. A doctor was summoned and found he had a slight fever, but thought little of it. Field did not feel much better on Sunday, although he cheerfully entertained several visitors, one of whom he told, “It is a lovely day, but this is the season of the year when things die, and this fine weather may mean death to a thousand people. We may hear of many deaths tomorrow.”  Field retired and slept soundly until dawn, in the room he shared with one of his sons. At about 5:00 a.m., his son heard him groan, put out his hand to check on him, and found him dead, of an apparent massive heart attack. Field was forty-five years old.

At his funeral in Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church, the Reverend Frank Bristol described Field’s religious views this way: “I have said of my dear friend that he had a creed. His creed was love. He belonged to a church—the church of the common brotherhood of man….Ever was he putting into his verses those ideas of the living God, the blessed Christ, the ministering angels of immortal love, the happiness of heaven.” Field was buried at Graceland Cemetery, but was reinterred in 1926 by his son-in-law at the Church of the Holy Comforter in Kenilworth, Illinois.

Poet-Politician Mirabeau Lamar complained, ‘I feel queerly--I believe I am going to die’—and promptly did

Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar is generally thought of (if at all) as a politician who almost inadvertently served as second President of the Republic of Texas—but he was also a poet, and if not a distinguished one, he was at least persistent. Lamar was born August 16, 1798, in Louisville, Georgia, and grew up on his father’s plantation in Milledgeville, Georgia. As a boy he was adept at the manly arts of horsemanship, fencing, oil painting, and writing poetry.  One of his verses was called “An Evening on the Banks of the Chattahoochee” (a river whose charms must be overpowering, for half a century later they would also provide poetic inspiration to another poet, named Sidney Lanier).

Lamar dabbled in newspaper publishing in Cahawba, Alabama, where his New Year’s poem in the Cahawba Press suggested that he had more aptitude for meter than for rhyme.  It reads in part:

            Yearly doth the Laureat sing

            In honor of his country’s King.

            And Poets annually raise

            To Patrons tributary lays.

            With Printers, too, it is in vogue

            To write to friends a New Year’s ode,

            And in compliance with the fashion,

            I’ll make some rhymes if I can match ‘em.

It is easy to see that poetry was not and never would be Lamar’s primary occupation. He became the secretary of the governor of Georgia, founded the Columbus Enquirer, won a seat in the state senate, failed twice to win election to Congress, and then, after his wife's death from tuberculosis, moved to Texas in 1835, just in time to be on hand when the Anglo colonists, a rambunctious bunch of trouble-makers, many of whom were in Texas to escape authorities in the United States, decided to rid themselves of the nuisance of the Mexican authorities as well.

Still writing poems, Lamar had the good sense to avoid being caught in the Alamo in 1836, but then joined the Texian (as it was then known) army as a private and, given the shortage of presentable soldiers, wound up being promoted to colonel a mere month later. He led the cavalry at the Battle of San Jacinto, which resulted in Texas’ independence from the civilizing influence of the Mexicans. 

In September of the same year, his career rising like a rocket, Lamar was elected Vice President of the fledgling Republic of Texas, an office that made so little demand on his time that he spent most of his term back in Georgia studying Spanish and blithely accepting adulation as a war hero. 

When he returned to Texas the following year, he threw himself into organizing the Philosophical Society, when he suddenly realized that a campaign to elect him to succeed Sam Houston as President of Texas had been launched without his knowledge or approval. He opted to stay in the race when the only other two candidates both committed suicide before the election, making the ease of his victory the envy of every politician in the world.

As President, Lamar advocated setting aside land for schools and universities, and even though none of these institutions was actually established during his administration, he thereby became known as “the Father of Texas Education.”  Delving into his poetic vocabulary, he once said in a speech that a “cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy,” and someone translated that into Latin as Disciplina Praesidium Civitatis and made it the motto of the University of Texas.

Lamar lived more than twenty years after his Presidency ended, fought Mexicans with General Zachary Taylor in 1846, served for a couple of years in the 1850s as United States minister to Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and continued to advocate secession from the Union by the Southern slave states and to create poetry up to his last breath—which came quite unexpectedly on December 19, 1859, when in the midst of preparations for Christmas on his plantation in Richmond, Texas, he remarked (ungrammatically, it must be pointed out), “I feel very queerly; I believe I am going to die”—and then promptly did so, at the age of sixty-one. The attending doctor said death was caused by a “heart ailment” and “apoplexy.”

Poet-Masochist A. C. Swinburne Dead at 72 After Lurid Life of Vice (Supposedly)

The fanciful English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne delighted in making people think he was a flagrant sexual debauchee who indulged in every known vice—and then some. As an Eton schoolboy, he learned to take pleasure in masochistic flagellation and devoured the licentious writings of the Marquis de Sade and the adventurer Richard Burton. During a year that he lived at the home of Oxford classmate Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he annoyed  Rossetti and interrupted his painting by whooping and hollering as he and a boyfriend slid naked down the banisters. Rossetti once tried to enlist the help of the infamous American actress Adah Isaacs Menken to introduce Swinburne to heterosexual copulation, but she gave up, claiming, “I can’t make him understand that biting is of no use.”  Swinburne even spread stories that he had once had sex with a monkey, which he then ate.

Fellow poet and pederast Oscar Wilde thought these lurid tales were gross exaggerations or pure fiction. Swinburne, he insisted, was “a braggart in matters of vice, who has done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestialiser.” There is no question, however, that the diminutive Swinburne, who was just over five feet tall, was a serious alcoholic, who would undoubtedly have been dead in his forties, if he hadn’t been rescued and dried out by a friend.

This peculiar and paradoxical chap was born April 5, 1837, in Grosvenor Place, London, the eldest of six children of an admiral and the daughter of an earl. He led a privileged childhood, growing up on the Isle of Wight, where he was known as a “demoniac boy,” who would sometimes skip about the room reciting poetry at the top of his lungs. After Eton, he studied (or not) at Balliol College, Oxford, but was rusticated before earning a degree. After that he lollygagged around literary circles in London, gaining a reputation as a poet, novelist, and critic, as well as a dissolute roué. His most famous poetical works were Atalanta in Calydon, Poems and Ballads, Songs Before Sunrise, and Tristram of Lyonesse. He also wrote novels, plays, and critical studies of Shakespeare, Jonson, Hugo, Blake, Shelley, and Baudelaire. A poet noted for his metrical dexterity and a contributor to the Encyclopædia Britannica, Swinburne was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature six times—but never won it. 

Although raised as a high-church Anglican, Swinburne was a pagan at heart and savagely satirized all organized religion. A frail man, with an excitable disposition and an abnormally large head, he was subject to frequent seizures and falls, which left him bruised and bloody, and which may have been the result of epilepsy, not to mention excessive drinking. In 1879, at the age of forty-two, he suffered a complete physical breakdown. 

His friend and literary agent, Theodore Watts-Dunton, intervened and sequestered Swinburne at The Pines, his suburban home in Putney, weaning  him from drink and isolating him from his former rowdy companions. Swinburne remained under Watts-Dunton’s care for the next thirty years, leading a sober and sedate life, growing increasingly deaf and reclusive, and continuing to write verse, drama, and criticism. In the spring of 1909 Swinburne contracted influenza, which developed into pneumonia, and he died April 10 at the age of seventy-two. He was buried at St. Boniface Church in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight, his boyhood home.

Note: Portrait of Swinburne at age 23 by William Bell Scott, online collection of Balliol College, Oxford

Notorious ‘green fairy’ took its toll on Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine at 51

French poet Paul Verlaine was far too fond of the “green fairy”—the popular nickname for absinthe, a potentially lethal 140-proof anise-flavored spirit that flowed freely in nineteenth-century Parisian cafes. In a messy life, marked by frequent self-indulgent debauchery, Verlaine abandoned his wife and infant son for a steamy affair with seventeen-year-old Arthur Rimbaud, served eighteen months in prison for shooting Rimbaud in a lovers’ quarrel, converted to Catholicism while incarcerated, had a weird relationship with another teenaged youth, and finally died miserably at fifty-one in the home of a retired prostitute. Though denied membership in the Académie Française, he was given the coveted title of  “Prince of Poets” and is regarded today as one of France’s most important literary figures.

This paradox of a man was born March 30, 1844, in Metz, a northeastern French city, and moved with his family to Paris at age seven. He attended the neighborhood lycée, then earned a bachelor’s degree and went to work as a clerk at City Hall. The job was a sinecure in which he showed up at ten, had a two-hour liquid lunch, staggered back to his office to shuffle papers until five, and then repaired to the Café de Gaz for aperitifs. He hung out with bohemian writers and artists, wrote poetry and art criticism, and in 1866 published a volume of his verse, rich with mystical images of Symbolism. The poems were praised by Stéphane Mallarmé and Victor Hugo, and they earned Verlaine a secure place in the literary world. 

In 1870, when he was twenty-six, he married a sixteen-year-old girl, Mathilde Mauté, and shortly they had a son whom they called Georges. Two years later, Verlaine received a fan letter from an admiring provincial youth and fledgling poet named Arthur Rimbaud.  So smitten was he by this hero worship that he sent the young man, not yet seventeen, trainfare to join him in Paris. Rimbaud moved in with Verlaine, his wife and infant son, and Mathilde’s parents. He was not an ideal house guest: he loved to sunbathe naked in the front garden, where he combed his filthy hair and flicked lice on passers-by; he trashed his room; and he mutilated the family’s heirloom crucifix.

Despite—or maybe because of—this behavior, Verlaine was fascinated with the young man. He described him as “tall, well built, almost athletic, with the perfectly oval face of an angel in exile, with unruly light chestnut hair and eyes of a disquieting blue.” They made an odd couple. Verlaine, according to friends, was indisputably ugly, with an over-large skull, unaligned eyes, tiny pug nose, sparse strands of hair on his head, and scraggly whiskers on his chin. When the mother of one of Verlaine’s friends met him, she said, "My God, he made me think of an orangutan escaped from the zoo!"

Verlaine fell in willingly with Rimbaud’s disreputable lifestyle. They even collaborated on a graphic homoerotic sonnet whose title is best translated “Sonnet in Praise of the Butthole.” Their steamy affair culminated in late 1872, when Verlaine and Rimbaud went to London together, and then to Brussels. It was there that they fell into a ferocious fight, and Verlaine pulled out a pistol and shot Rimbaud, hitting him twice in the arm. Although Rimbaud was not seriously wounded, Verlaine was arrested and sentenced to eighteen months in prison.  While there he underwent a religious conversion and resumed his Catholic faith, renouncing his bohemian life.

While the conversion was evidently sincere, the renunciation of la vie de bohème was not long-lasting. Verlaine resumed his lifelong dependency on absinthe, and in 1877, he fell in love with another seventeen-year-old boy, Lucien Létinois, a student of his at the College de Notre Dame in the town of Rethel. While there is evidence that their relationship remained platonic, at least in its early years, they were both dismissed from the school for “inappropriate behavior.” They continued to see each other, but in 1883 Lucien died of typhoid fever. 

Lucien’s death marked Verlaine’s abandonment of his literary work and the beginning of his physical and mental decline into alcoholism, drug addiction, and poverty. He was able to eke out a living with a few lectures in France, England, and Belgium. He was sent to prison again briefly for trying to strangle his mother. (She later died of pneumonia after venturing out in nasty weather to buy tobacco for her son.) Verlaine spent time in hospitals for treatment of infections and miscellaneous diseases. He lodged with various friends, and in 1896 he wound up in a fourth-floor room at 39 rue Descartes, the home of his friend Eugénie Krantz, a retired prostitute. The critic Saint-Georges Bouhélier gave this account of his last day in an article in Le Figaro: 

     "January 8 was not a bad day, at last no more so than other days, and with Andre Cornuty, Frédéric-Auguste Cazals, and other comrades, Verlaine traded stories, mixed with his habitual complaints. It was all quite normal, passing easily from laughter to sadness and tears.  Towards evening, his friends left, leaving Eugénie at his bedside. What happened between them?  Most likely Verlaine wanted    

something and asked her to fetch it. She answered crossly, he became annoyed, and she hurled insults at him. Whenever he  became angry, she could always dish it out as well as he could. Verlaine tried to get out of bed to attack her.  He fell on the floor—perhaps pushed by Eugénie.  She left him lying there, half-naked, in a badly heated room, on a night that was especially cold. From her room she could hear him whimpering. But she dared not poke her nose into his business!  Every household finds its own kind of peace, as the simple folk  say.  Early in the morning, Eugénie came back to Verlaine’s room.  She found him in the same place, in agony, and covered in sweat."

Eugénie summoned a doctor, who applied a mustard plaster. “That bites,” winced Verlaine. Those were his last intelligible words. He died later that evening, officially of “pulmonary congestion,” but his doctor concluded, “He had at least ten mortal maladies—he was worn out—a mere husk of a human being.” Verlaine was fifty-one.

His funeral was two days later at the Church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. Gabriel Fauré was the organist, and the mourners included much of the Parisian literati. Verlaine was buried in the Cimitière des Batignolles.