A Tale of Two Charlevilles A TALE OF TWO CHARLEVILLES Driving idly about counties Cork and Limerick in Ireland recently,

we passed a sign to Charleville and I thought, Oh, three Charlevilles! but decided to let it pass and concentrate on the other two. One will be well-known to Australians, while the other, named these days Charleville-Mzires, is in the Ardennes, northern France, and is the true excuse for this story. Amateur historians of Qantas like to say that it was conceived in Cloncurry, born in Winton and grew up in Longreach, but that leaves out Charleville. The first Qantas airmail flight took off from Charleville in 1922, on what became the airlines first scheduled routeCharleville to Cloncurry via Longreach and Winton, and the town continued to be of importance in the airlines early years. As well, Charleville was a compulsory check-point on the 1934 London to Melbourne air race, while various other pioneer aviators, including Amy Johnson and Ross and Keith Smith, landed there either by dire necessity or choice. On the banks of the Warrego River in south-central-outback Queensland, to have a stab at its position, Charleville is a town that I have travelled through often on journeys to relatives scattered along the Tropic of Capricorn between Longreach and Barcaldine. The towns pride is the heritage listed Hotel Corones, famously known as the Raffles of the inland, while its historic aviation links live on in the Royal Flying Doctor base. There are also the school of the air and the Cosmos astronomical centre. Staying there once at a not quite a Raffles of the inland motel, I marvelled at a plaque at shoulder height on the outer brick wall marking the great 1990 floods. At the time almost all of the west was in severe drought, the fighting Warrego reduced to pits of dried mud and the Matilda Highway, from Cunnamulla to Charleville and on to Blackall and Barcaldine, running through a scorched, sheep-ravaged desert, abandoned even by emus. The drought had the motel proprietor in poor temper; he could be heard growling in reply to a womans persistent grumble and when my young boys went to play in the garden, after about eight hours in the car, he barked, Get yer hands off the stork statue! Dont touch them flamin sprinklers, ya little buggers! Clear off the lawn! (call that a lawn?) sending them hurriedly indoors. The floods returned in 2010, proving what those of us descended from the bush know to be true: it is a land of drought and flooding rains (Dorothea Mackellar) and possibly not improving this mans mood as the waters surged again to the plaque. My mothers parents were both from outback Queensland(1); her maternal great-great grandmother, Marie Brigitte Rens (ne Coymans)known to all

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A Tale of Two Charlevilles as Madame Rens (she enjoyed a variety of other Christian names, most often Josephine; she sometimes styled herself Josephine de Rens, and often Widow Rens)had come from France with her 12 year old daughter Jeanette in 1827. Life was challenging, oceans away from the court of Empress Josephine (thus the use of the name) and the aristocratic fringes she was said to occupy until the dissolution of Napoleons marriage to Josephine (and subsequent marriage to Marie Louise of Austria), and her reasons for exiling herself at the age of 40 to Australia remain unclear (2). Jeanette married Gilbert Cory, an early Hunter Valley farmer, and went on to produce 10 children several of whom became pioneer settlers in the 1850s on land between the Barcoo and Thompson rivers in the vicinity of Stonehenge, which everyone will know to be a dot 150 kilometres south of Longreach, over 400 kilometres northwest of Charleville (yes, that Stonehenge!). This really is remote, arid (though not in 2010/2011) country of never-ending horizons; 160 years ago its isolation would have been as forbidding as that of Australia from France. The Corys history in the region intersects with that of Qantas and can be seen in the Longreach visitor information centre which is housed in the original Qantas office, run my great uncle Frank Cory in the 1920s. Travelling by train across northern France, I thought of Madame Rens and her origins in Tournai, a French-speaking town now in Belgium, which, as a consequence of the tumultuous history of this region, shifted between Napoleonic France and Hapsburg Austria. Coming from Rheims, in the heart of Champagne, I was heading to Charleville-Mzires through verdant, wellcared for farmlands, a harmonious vision which recalled the observation of some pointy-head that the desolate, parched appearance of much of Australias pastoral heartland and its forsaken towns might be seen as collateral damage inflicted by the European agricultural policy and in particular the French enthusiasm for it, enthusiasm resulting in these beautiful meadows and vibrant villages; (La France profonde as opposed to the mulga, the donga, the never never). But I was searching not for the answer to this riddle, nor for my forebears origins but for those of her compatriot, Arthur Rimbaud, the precocious, enfant terrible of French literature whose extraordinary poetry, revolutionary in its vision and form, has influenced artists and dreamers from the French Decadents to the Surrealists, Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, the Beats and Brett Whitley. You leave the station at Charleville and walk straight onto a large landscaped square where stands a bust of our hero. A poem, A la musique (To Music) is set here in the Charleville Place de la Gare:
On the square, tailored into meagre lawns, Where alls as it should be, flowers, trees, Chesty bourgeois stifling in Thursday-evening Heat, parade their small-town spite and jealousy []

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The poem, written when he was about 15, proceeds to ferociously satirise all of the familiar goings-on and personages of this humdrum place, before Rimbaud turns to himself:
--Me Im a scruffy student: I find Quick little girls under chestnut-trees; They know my game and laugh, looking at me, Eyes wide with indiscretion. I say not a word; I go on looking At the whiteness of their necks, the wisps, the curls; Beneath bodices and flimsy frocks, I trace Divine backs, starting with shoulders, heading south. Soon Ive laid bare a shoe, a stocking --I reconstruct their bodies, flames of fine fever. They find me odd, and whisper behind their hands And my brutal desires sink hooks into their lips(3)

And we can see why the inscription on the bust near the station is laughably inapt: To Jean-Arthur Rimbaud / His Admirers /The State. Rimbauds admirers have been plentiful, but in his lifetime the typical view of officialdom was that of a policeman, written on the occasion of an early apprehension, In morality and talent, this Raimbaud (sic), aged between 15 and 16, was and is a monster. He can construct poems like no one else, but his works are completely incomprehensible and repulsive. Here is a prize-winning pupil who outraged the adults in his life with his anarchistic, irredeemable attitude to everything that underpinned the certainties of provincial bourgeois society Really too stupid, those village churches, he begins Les Premires Communions (First Communions):
Really too stupid those village churches Where fifteen ugly brats besmirching the pillars Listen to the Bible-babble uvulated By a freak in black, wearing rotted shoes: But through the leaves the sun wakes up Old colours in uneven windows [] The girls always go to church, happy to hear Themselves called sluts after Mass or Evensong By boys who think they have style. Those who one day will taste the chic Of barrack-rooms now taunt the toffs in cafs, Sporting new shirts, chanting filthy songs. Meanwhile the Pastor chooses pictures For the young; in his fastness, when prayers are done And the air fills with distant snatches of a dance, Never mind what Heaven says, he feels His toes tingle with pleasure, his foot tap the beat

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And night comes, black pirate on a sky of gold. Among the catechists whove gathered From Faubourgs and Smart Districts, the Priest spotted This little unknown girl with sad eyes under Sallow brow. Her parents might be quiet janitors. On the Great Day, choosing her from all the catechists, God will shower her with blessings, like snow [] Vaguely indecent curiosities Horrify pure-blue dreams, startled to find Themselves among the heavenly robes, The linen which wraps Christs nakedness []

The poem accelerates into an unbridled attack on the church, scandalously accusing the priesthood of acting as procurers for God in seducing young communicants, exploiting their latent or secret sexual attraction to Jesus:
I was young, Christ soured my breath, Choked me with loathing. You kissed my hair as thick as wool, And I let youFor you men Its so easy, with no thought that a woman deeply In love, in the frightening filth of her conscience, Is most prostituted, in greatest pain, With no thought that our love for You is madness []

Charleville straggles a bit before opening on to the completely unanticipated Place Ducale, a magnificent version of the Place des Vosges in Paris, attesting to a past aristocracy with visions way beyond the provincial. The poet is remembered in the splendid Muse Arthur Rimbaud located in a 17th century mill house on quai Arthur Rimbaud which runs along the picturesque river Meuse, beautiful in a way that our poor Warrego, battered by all manner of natural and man-made assaults, can but dream of; at the spot where, in 1871, he composed his most celebrated poem, the hallucinatory Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat), and, finally, in the graveyard where stand proudly his tomb and that of his long-suffering mother, Vitalie, known by choice as Veuve (widow) Rimbaud. (Her husband, a soldier, abandoned the family in 1860). There is even a Rimbaud post-box in the cemetery. Despite all this fanfare for its most famous son, Charleville was never where Rimbaud felt he belonged. Born in 1854, he ran away four times before the age of 17, was often in trouble with the law, and died in Marseilles at only 37 after a picaresque life, much of which was spent wandering in Ethiopia and Yemen. He wrote what he called his derangement of all the senses verse between the ages of 15 and 21, gave up writing and became variously explorer, Arabist, gun runner, trader and sailor.

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A Tale of Two Charlevilles Rimbauds Charleville, despite his preference for exile, must be classed as one of Frances immemorial fictional places along with Balzacs Paris, Prousts Combray and Sartres Bouville (Graham Robb, in an exemplary biography (4)). His hybrid origins, urban and rural, peasant and bourgeois, jump from his verse, along with his familiarity with and antipathy to everyday things, scenes and people of his hometown, even if you have to puzzle, unravel and take a punt to discern them. The poem Mmoire, set by the Meuse, reverberates with hazily recalled scenes from this life, strung together in a river of startling associations and using a technique that demonstrates that Rimbaud was writing for an audience that did not yet exist. It is only after a century of modernist literature and cinema that the minds eye can perform the acrobatic feats that were apparently quite routine for Rimbaud (Robb).
Clear water; like the salt of childhood tears, the assault of the sum of the whiteness of womens bodies; the silk, pure lily, in a host, of the banners beneath the walls whose defence was entrusted to a maid; the frolic of angels;no the.the golden current moving, stirs its grassy arms, black, heavy, above all cool. She sinks, with the blue Sky a canopy over her bed, calls for curtains: the shade of the hill and the arch [] A toy of this dreary eye of water, I cannot grasp, O motionless boat! O too short arms! Neither one flower nor the other, neither the yellow that importunes me, there, nor the friendly blue in the ashen water. Ah! The dust of the willows that are shaken by a wing! The roses of the reeds, long since devoured! My boat, still fixed; and its chain pulled down to the bed of this rimless eye of waterto what mud? (translation

Graham Robb)

(That boat, stuck in the mud, contrasts with the drunken boat, abandoned to its wild journeyI had the current take me where I wished.). Much of Rimbauds verse is contemptuous of religion, the state, emperors and kings. In Le Mal (Evil), French (scarlet) and Prussian soldiers (green) slaughter each other, but are treated with brutal indifference by their rulers, and a god who is moved only by the rituals of religion and money.
While the red mouths of machine-guns spit blood And whistle non-stop in the endless blue, Whilescarlet or green beside their sneering king Massed battalions are blown to bits, While nightmare madness stacks A million men on smoking heaps --You poor beggars, dead in summers grass,

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In your joy, Nature, maker of these saintly men. There is a God, who laughs at patterned Altar-cloths, incense, great gold chalices, Whos lulled to sleep by Hosannas, And Who wakes when mothers, huddled In the black of grief, tie a small coin In their handkerchief, and give it Him.

In Les Potes de sept ans (Seven-year-old Poets), Rimbaud puts on display the emotions of the bright, precocious child confronting the tensions of his relationship with his mother, and the boredom and constraints of Charleville. He was 17 and about to leave for the third time; the last line captures the idea of escape and adventure later embraced totally by The Drunken Boat (From that time on, I bathed in the Poem of the sea, lactescent and steeped in stars)
And the Mother, shutting his homework, Went off proud, well-pleased and oblivious To the revolted heart of her boy, In those blue eyes, on that raging brow. All day he sweated obedience; such Intelligence; but those give-away Dark tics showed a sharp hypocrisy[] Some nights when the garden-patch behind The house was washed clean by winter moons Hed lie by a wall, covered in clay, Stabbing his cod-eye to see what he Might see, hearing the stunted trees growl[] Seven years old, writing romances About the Great Desert, rapturous Light of freedom, forests, savannahs, Suns! Hes plunder magazines, looking At laughing Latin girls, and blushing. When the sloe-eyed eight-year-old daughter Of the workers next door came in, wild And savage in her cotton frock, jumped On him suddenly, onto his back, Tossing her hair, hed bite her buttocks She didnt believe in underwear. Bruised all over by her heels and fists He took her taste back into his room[] How he relished dark things, above all When in his tall, bare, blue and empty Shuttered room, sharp with humidity, He read of his endlessly planned romance Full of heavy ochre skies and drowned Forests, fresh flowers in star-studded woods, Spiral spins, routs, collapse and pity! --While down in the streets the noise went on,

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He lay alone on rough sheets, thinking Violent thoughts of getting under sail!

The collection Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell) was written by Rimbaud in 1873 at the family farm near Charleville, after a period of vagabondage in France, Belgium and London in the company of fellow troublemaker and sometime lover, the poet Paul Verlaine (who actually shot Rimbaud during one disturbance). The prose and verse poem Dlires II, Alchimie du verbe (Second Delirium: Alchemy of the Word) begins:
My turn. The history of one of my madnesses. For a long time I had boasted that I held every possible scene in my hands, and I thought laughable the great figures of modern painting and poetry. What I liked were absurd paintings, decorations over doorways, stage scenery, travelling fairs backcloths, inn-signs, cheap coloured prints; literature gone out of fashion, church Latin, erotic books with bad spelling, novels our grandmothers used to read, fairytales, little books for children, old operas, meaningless refrains, crude rhythms. I dreamed of crusades, unlogged journeys of discovery, republics with no history, wars of religion put down, revolutions in manners, races and continents on the move: I believed in each and every piece of magic. I invented the colour of vowels!A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green.I organised the shape and movement of every consonant, and by means of instinctive rhythms, flattered myself that I was the inventor of a poetic language, accessible sooner or later to all the senses. Interpretation I kept for myself. First I made a study. I wrote down silences, nights, I noted the ineffable. I nailed vertigo [] I got used to hallucination, pure and simple: I would see, fair and square, a mosque where there was a factory, a drum-corps of angels, coaches on the roads in the sky, a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries; horrors leaped up before me from the titles of some vaudeville. And then I explained my magic solipsisms by turning words into hallucinations! Finally I came to consider my minds disorder as sacred. I was idle, prey to oppressive fever; I envied the happiness of beasts caterpillars, who represent the innocence of limbo; moles, the sleep of virginity! My character was turning sour. I said my farewells to the world in ballads of a sort []

Rimbaud was not yet 20, and his imagination, linguistic dexterity, ambition and alienation from not only the comforts and self-satisfaction of life in Charleville, but from France, were all at fever pitch. On the eve of his next and near final departure he composed Illuminations, a collection of prose poems that was published a few years before his death, though by then he seems to have been indifferent to or unaware of it. Considered a risky pack of cards by the publisher, Illuminations dances a tightrope strung between coherence and chaos, there comes into being a bedazzlement of events and moments, people and apparitions, dissolving as quickly as they appear, as if each illumination was like a waking dream. (Martin Sorrell). Illuminations also gives endorsement to the comments of his doting sister, Isabelle, that on his death bed, Rimbaud ranged from the oracular to the

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A Tale of Two Charlevilles obscene, opening windows to a wider world, as he had always done. The poem, Soir historique (Historic Evening) illustrates:
On some evening, shall we say, when the innocent tourist, away from our economic horrors, the hand of a master touches into life the harpsichord of the meadows; there is a card game going on at the bottom of a pond, a mirror which evokes queens and favourites, there are women saints, the veils, the threads of harmony, and the legendary chromatics against the sunset. He gives a shudder as the hunts and hordes go past. The play drips onto the grass staging. And the embarrassment of the poor and the frail on these stupid levels! To his enslaved sight,Germany scaffolds up towards moons; the Tartar deserts light upthe ancient revolts seethe in the heart of the Celestial Empire, in the stairways and armchairs of kingsa little world, pale and flat, Africa and Occidents, is going to be built. Then a ballet of known seas and nights, a worthless chemistry, and impossible melodies. The same bourgeois magic wherever the packet-boat happens to put us ashore! The most elementary physicist can feel that it is possible no longer to submit oneself to this private atmosphere, this fog of physical remorse, to recognise which in itself is an affliction. No!The day of the steam-room, of seas removed, of underground conflagrations, of the planet borne away, and the resultant exterminations, certainties indicated so mildly by the Bible and the Norns*, and which it will be the serious persons lot to watch over.But in no way will this be the stuff of legend! [*fates, in Norse mythology].

As I walk about this agreeable, attractive Charleville, contemplating the poets short, audacious life and brilliant and substantial body of work, I recall that many extraordinary people have emerged from out-of-the way places and numbingly ordinary families. I wonder, though, whether the other Charleville could have produced a Rimbaud. My ancestors from Scotland, France/Belgium and Devon/Cornwall, and their offspring, who settled in the Queensland outback were salty, hard working types who probably would have regarded a Rimbaud in their midst as a raving ratbag. His dazzling language, fragmentary dreams and nightmares and splintering emotionsin writing that, like his life, was, fantastic, subversive and seductive, would have resulted in people saying something like wake up to yerself! Granted, my own grandmother, Everil Murray (ne Cory), marooned for the first half of last century on a lonely outback property north of Ilfracombe wrote poetry and dreamed of a life amongst the bohemians in Sydneys Kings Cross. Yet even her verse, entirely well mannered, and reflecting wonderfully the trials, joys, charms and characters of the bush, was that of an outsider. She published in The Bulletin as ER (Everil Rens) Murray to pass as a man, and corresponded with Sydney poets but was never free to join them. A respectable country wife and mother, in the days when sheep graziers formed a kind of ersatz gentry (lording it over even the cattlemen in their ostentatious hats, for example) would have been discouraged from indulging in such nonsense. But, then, after all, the young Arthur Rimbaud dreamed of desert romances, being hurled high by hurricanes through birdless space, violently setting sail, and once urgently demanded, Quick! Are there other lives? (in Une

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A Tale of Two Charlevilles saison en enfer), and then spent the rest of his disturbed, confronting life in exileso perhaps both our Charlevilles were of doubtful value to dreamers: sources of material, maybe, but fabulous places to run away from. And finally, a role for the third Charleville: Charleville, County Cork, Province of Munster, Ireland gave its name to Charleville, Queensland; the government surveyor had come from there. (A link with France is embedded, nevertheless, in the name of the Irish town and also in the name Munster).

Notes 1. Where the outback begins is a subject of some contention. My cousin Rob Chandler reckons it begins on the main street of Barcaldine, where the Capricorn Highway and Landsborough Highway meet (in the guise of Oak and Box streets). He would know, hes the mayor. 2. Much of Madame Renss past is also a subject of contention. My aunt, Everil Taylor, ne Murray, has written a lively history of the Cory family which questions the myths around her having been lady-in waiting to Empress Josephine, Napoleons wife, and that she was betrothed to her cousin Count de Grammont, but eloped with Napoleons aide-de-camp, Edouard Dsire Constant Rens, and that the marriage certificate was witnessed and signed by the Empress; but concludes that the facts do not appear to support the myth and yet there is much of her life which remains a mystery. (Although her marriage to Edouard Rens is not in doubt). 3. Translations of Rimbauds verse, except where indicated, Martin Sorrell, Arthur Rimbaud Collected Poems, Oxford World Classics, 2001). 4. Graham Robb, Rimbaud: A Biography, Norton, 2000. A version of this story was published in The Australian 21 22 January 2012.

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