Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud, poet and ex-poet, took a 41 shoe - about a seven and a half in British sizes, an American eight. We have his own word on this, in a letter written shortly before his death at the age of 37, requesting a stocking for varicose veins. The jaunty teenager smoking a pipe in Verlaine's famous sketch - dearer to Rimbaud's admirers than the simpering soul in Fantin-Latour's group portrait of the same year - has elegant legs. But of the eight pairs hidden from view in the Fantin-Latour, Rimbaud's were surely the toughest, the most serviceable, when it came to getting about. Nimble feet on peasant legs which, against every impulse of peasant culture, drove him away from the farmyard across the dank pastures of Northern France and Belgium, and a few years later, down through Italy, racking up great distances in the course of a day.

LRB 30 July 1998 | PDF Download