In the 6th arrondissement, a stone's throw from the superb Jardin du Luxembourg, a small street conceals a real literary curiosity: a poem entirely calligraphed on a wall,"Bateau Ivre", byArthur Rimbaud. Rue Férou, home to such great writers as Jacques Prévert, Ernest Hemingway and Guillaume Apollinaire, has been home to a huge fresco on the wall of a public finance center since 2012.
And it's not an extract from the poem that we find, but its entirety, which can be read from a distance of several meters, from right to left, making it a little more complicated to decipher. But why is there a poem on a wall? Quite simply, it's a tribute to the area where Rimbaud, not yet of age and freshly arrived in Paris, first recited this famous text on September 30, 1871, in a restaurant just a few steps away.
This fresco of one hundred life-size verses is an initiative of the Dutch Tegen-Beeld Foundation and the international association Les Amis de Rimbaud, and was created by hand by Dutch calligrapher Jan Willem Bruin, who spent almost ten weeks at work. A real piece of open-air poetry, to be discovered free of charge in the streets of the capital.
