While on the hunt for photos for Daniel Mendelsohn’s piece on Arthur Rimbaud in this week’s issue, I came across an article that heralded the discovery, in a flea market, of the first known photograph of Rimbaud as an adult, taken in August, 1880, when he was twenty-five years old. I was not just a little intrigued—many books and magazines have had to make do with publishing images of Rimbaud as a youth, since, after abandoning his writing around 1875, travelling extensively (and mostly on foot) throughout Europe, deserting the Dutch Colonial Army after getting all the way to Indonesia, and working as a foreman at a stone quarry in Cyprus, Rimbaud all but disappeared into a life as a merchant in Aden, Yemen, in 1880.
I contacted the booksellers who made the discovery, Jacques Desse and Alban Causse, to get their story. “At first, we bought this batch of photographs because it included a photographic print of Freemasons in the East, which we thought was very interesting,” Desse told me. “Then we noticed that the photographs had been taken in Aden within the time when Rimbaud was there, and that they came from the files of a close friend of Rimbaud’s, Jules Suel, the owner of l’Hôtel de l’Univers. After two years of research, we thought that there was a strong chance that Rimbaud appeared in one of the photographs. We contacted the official biographer of Rimbaud, Jean-Jacques Lefrère, who confirmed that it was indeed Rimbaud.”
Photographs courtesy Libraires associés and Adoc Photos.
