Which, being dolts, they copy word for word. And so the class is roaring-laughing, as, like a pistol shot, Master Delporte’s supple cane smacks the miscreant’s desk. Dark hair splattering, the master is now shaking Rimbaud’s work for hire in the fat, freckled face of the woeful Jacques Sorel, whose ample cheeks are painted with two livid red handprints—slap, slap! Again, the cane smacks Sorel’s desk, inches from his quivering nose. “Abominable plagiarist! Do you presume to insult my intelligence by claiming—liar!—that it was you, imbecile, and not he who wrote this?” Indeed, he is pointing his cane, that rapier of pain, at the pure puzzlement of the wrongly accused Arthur Rimbaud. “Moi?” Beginning to make trouble in school, to goof off, the prize boy has now morphed into the rebel hero. A Byzantine. A brigantine. Lurid strange. Delahaye, Gorgeon, Doinel, sometimes Lalande, like a pack of dogs, they all follow Rimbaud after school. Circumscribing vast circles around Charleville, they talk, his followers, about poems and particularly stupid, grotesque, or simply ridiculous people—and, of course, girls, although this goes nowhere; why, in Charleville, the girls are so locked up, so stuck up, that it’s thrilling just to have a girl turn up her nose at you!
What do You think about Disaster Was My God (2011)?
