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How did prison contribute to Paul Verlaine’s return to Roman Catholicism?
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Paul Verlaine
Paul Verlaine, detail from Un Coin de table, oil painting by Henri Fantin-Latour, 1872; in the Louvre, Paris.
During his two-year imprisonment at Mons for wounding Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine experienced a sincere return to Roman Catholicism in the summer of 1874. This transformation was facilitated by a combination of contrition, the enforced abstinence of prison life, and dedicated pious reading, which included religious texts as well as the study of authors such as Shakespeare and Dickens.1
Verlaine later documented this period of his life and his religious conversion in his prose work titled Mes Prisons. Following his release in 1875, he briefly attempted a Trappist retreat, and his subsequent poetry, particularly the collection Sagesse, reflected both his emotional odyssey and his expressions of simple Catholic Christianity.1