(And why did we name a men's fragrance after him, and not Rimbaud?)

Situations have ended sad,
Relationships have all been bad.
Mine've been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud.*
-You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go. Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks, 1975

It's usually pretty hard to remember trains of thought-especially ones that passed by the nearest synapse station more than 15 years ago. But we (that would be the royal We) vividly remember the one that led us to arrive at the name "Baudelaire" for our company.

At the time, we had the working name Rare & Exotic Cosmetics-which rolls off the tongue with the same stumbling grace as the title of some Persian Dynastic king (Artaxerxes come immediately to mind, of course. And, unfortunately, won't go away).

In any event, the more literary of Us (that would be the royal Us) was instructed to come up with a more catchy name-something that would cause legions of unsuspecting consumers to storm stores everywhere demanding our products. Which would have been quite a feat at the time since we had yet to import our first product line.

Anyway, there we were, driving around the square in our archetypal New England town, watching the aforementioned trains of thought negotiate those narrow neural pathways, when the name of a famous bookstore "Shakespeare & Company" came to mind. Inspired, we switched to the literary line and, before long, the Bob Dylan lyric (above) appeared. The following is the exact route of the train of thought that followed, revealed here in its entirety for the first time!

Could we call the company Verlaine? Huh... How about Rimbaud? Wait. Who was that other crazy 19th C. French romantic? Oh yeah, Baudelaire. Beau-beautiful. Aire. Air. Sounds right for a fragrance company [even though that is not what the name means, by the way.] And what was that famous book of poetry he wrote? Les Fleurs du Mal? Uh Oh. Flowers of Evil? Huh...evil might be a bit of a hard sell. But they were sensual poems, right? Some of which were about fragrance, right? Besides, maybe that Mal shouldn't have been translated as "evil." "Sadness or "Trouble" maybe. Good enough for us. Let's name the company after him. First name, Charles, right?

So that's how we named the company Baudelaire. And you can certainly click on that link there to find out more about Charles Baudelaire. But, unfortunately, this essay is about Verlaine...

Fast forward to 2001. We decide to add men's fragrances to our Provence line. Why? Well, 'cause, as everyone knows, guys don't always smell so good! And that's in their natural state! You get them slathering on the latest department-store olfactory vision of what guys should smell like and you'll wish you had some of Dad's Bay Rum around again. So we asked our French connection to blend up some real classy and subtle fragrances-you know, something worthy of splashing on after a hard day cooking books or fettucine.

The first fragrance we developed was a combination of our ever-popular citrus-y vervaine with a little linden to soften it up. When asked to come up with a name, our Significant Other (that would be the royal "Other") immediately blurted out: "Vervaine! Linden! Call it Verlaine!!!!" Our second men's fragrance is Green Tea, and we begged ourselves to call it Rimbaud (pronounced, of course, "Rambo") but, so far, cooler heads have prevailed.

So here we are, about 500 words into a 250-word essay on Verlaine, and you still don't have a clue who he was! Well he, like Baudelaire, was an 18th C. French poet, one of the original French Symbolists who, along with Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme and others formed the group that's affectionately (and accurately) known as the Decadents. What was he like? Well, let's turn to our trustworthy (and pithy) Reader's Encyclopedia for details. (Giving credit where credit is due, ours was edited by William Rose Benet and published by Crowell in 1948.)

"Verlaine was extremely erratic in personality and behavior, living a Bohemian life which took him from cafés to hospitals and prisons, and alternating between sensuality and mysticism. He loved his wife, but after their separation, he engaged in liaisons of a perverted nature, the most notorious of which was with Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud is considered to have had a morally corrupting influence on Verlaine but to have assisted the older man in developing a new conception of poetry."

We, literally, could not have said it better ourselves. Although that "perverted" thing is a little harsh, in our opinion. After all, guys just want to have fun.

In any event, Paul was a rather jealous lover and ended up shooting Rimbaud in the wrist. OK, so they were a little drunk... He was jailed for two years to chill out which he did, big time, converting to Catholicism while incarcerated (a very pretty word for it!). When he got out, he tried unsuccessfully to reconcile with his wife, who had already divorced him, and Rimbaud who would hear nothing of it. (After all, his wrist was now permanently limp through no fault of his own).

Anyway, Verlaine moved to England where he continued to write poetry and lived a rather pious life for a while until his mother and favorite pupil died which sent him back to drinking and debauching. The rest of his life was spent between periods of hospital-enforced sobriety and drunkenness. He died in Paris in 1896. Thousands went to his funeral-because when push came to shove, which it often did in Verlaine's life, the guy could sure write. And he is more than worthy of having a male fragrance named after him, to whit...

Green

Voici des fruits, des fleurs, des feuilles et des branches
Et puis voici mon coeur, qui ne bat que pour vous,
Ne le dechirez pas avec vos deux mains blanches,
Et qu’a vos yeux si beaux l’humble present soit doux

Here are the fruits, the flowers, leaves, and branches
And then here is my heart, that beats only for you
Don’t tear it apart with your two pale hands,
But look upon it with those beautiful eyes as a present—modest and sweet.

Translation by us with a little help from our friends.

POSTSCRIPT
As we were about to upload this little biographical extravaganza, our brother told us that Verlaine was still serving his country 50 years after he died — thanks to the following poetic fragment.

Les sanglots longs des violins d'automne
Blessent mon coeur d'une langeur monotone

The long sobs of the violins of autumn
Wound my heart with a monotonous langor

It seems that a BBC announcer broadcast the first line (in a bunch of other enigmatic phrases) on the evening of June 1, 1944, and the second line on the evening of June 5, 1944. That sequence of lines from Verlaine told the French underground that the invasion was going to start within 48 hours. (see: Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1959, pp. 32-33, 96-97).