you can pay me the next time, ‘ and then, to his collegue : ‘It’s all right – these gentlemen are a regular customers.

If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud’s interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation....

As the shabby section of the audience rose to its feet, waving its hats and food-wrappers, a rich, stale smell wafted through the auditorium. It had something of the fog on the boulevard outside, where...