Stéphane Mallarmé caught a glimpse of Arthur Rimbaud on only one occasion and it was the younger poet’s hands that stuck in his memory. These were, he later wrote, “vast hands, red with sores,” which prompted the fastidious Mallarmé to say that “there was something defiantly or perversely emphatic about him, reminiscent of a working girl, specifically a laundress.” A Belgian judge was less squeamish, remarking that Rimbaud had “the hands of a strangler.” As Graham Robb, his latest and best biographer, remarks wryly, “these were not the delicate appendages from which elegant verses flow.” [1] Rough, country hands, adapted to rural chores, one might think, rather than to battering French literature (along with a few of its feebler practitioners), and yet, if anyone merits the questionable distinction of literary demolisher, it is Rimbaud. With ...

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