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French booksellers discover first adult Rimbaud picture

Two French booksellers have discovered the only clear image of the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud as an adult, after stumbling across it at a flea market.

Until now the author of Le Bateau Ivre and Illuminations has been best remembered as an angelic adolescent as all other portraits of him were blurred or silhouettes.

But Jacques Desse and Alban Causse made their extraordinary find when they came across a black and white photo taken circa 1880 among postcards and bric-a-brac in a market "somewhere in France".

The photo showed a group of mustachioed bourgeois Frenchmen and one woman in white and was signed Hotel de l'Univers on the back. Rimbaud enthusiasts would know this was the hotel in Aden, Abyssinia, where Rimbaud spent the last years of his life before dying of cancer aged 37.

The self-proclaimed literary "bounty hunters" were convinced the man staring defiantly at the camera was the flamboyant and libertine poet himself.

Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)