“London is Francophile” – Paul Verlaine
Saturday, March 18 at 3 PM
The Society Club in London, United Kingdom
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It’s difficult to overestimate the legendary status of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, but easy to underestimate the extent to which they are London writers. Join us on the afternoon of Saturay March 18 as poet-psychogeographer Niall McDevitt leads a walk through the ‘Red Soho’ of the early 1870s, following the trail of the immigrant poets in their first London habitat.
Though Rimbaud and Verlaine were ex-Communards living among the French refugee community in Soho, their situation was unique. They were on the run from the huge scandal they had created in literary Paris after the 27-year-old Verlaine abandoned his wife and child to embark on a tempestuous same-sex relationship with his 16-year-old protege Rimbaud.
McDevitt will tell the agonising story of how their lifestyle experiment crashed and burned, but also of how a London classic – Illuminations – came to be born.
Meet at 3pm for a fortifying absinthe cocktail before hitting the streets where an increasingly unhinged Verlaine was having visions of Sodom: ‘Oh the fires in the skyline of that city from the Bible’.
Tickets are £10, please click here to purchase: http://