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At the time of Les Illuminations he had plainly left behind De Nerval and Baudelaire, and the old masters of magic whose works he had read so avidly, and was in love, so he tells us, with "crazy paintings, overdoors, decorations, acrobats' backdrops, signs, popular illustrations; . . . church Latin, lewd books without spelling, novels of our ancestors, fairy tales. . . ." If he had ever planned "creation from the void" he had found it impracticable, and in default of something better had settled down to a contemplation of lowly objects, in order to break with human valuations and virtues. Nature especially was in his line. "I envied animals their contentment," he says, "caterpillars which symbolize the innocence of limbo, moles, the sleep of virginity." It is like the saying of Krishna: "A Brahmin, full of wisdom and virtue, an elephant, a cow, a dog, or an eater of dogs, in these the sage sees no difference."

But his serenity at moments of creation was not won without trouble at other times, and already he, was beginning to know disgust. By disgust I do not mean the perverse or the righteous indignation which gave point to his early attacks on Napoleon III and the Christian church, nor precisely the perverse ennui which led him to make fun of his townspeople and various officials whom he encountered. These emotions accompany a splendid feeling of superiority and are, in the present state of society, the birthright of every healthy young animal. Whereas it is the essence of disgust to implicate the disgusted person permanently with the disgusted thing, and besides liberating his destructive forces to turn them inward. With ennui as with seasickness it is the moment before expression that is painful, and Rimbaud by seventeen had rid himself via poetry of a heavy load of bitterness. Disgust is not so rapidly disposed of. It came upon him when, having given up aggression, he was trying to be on good terms with everything intelligence looked down upon, to lose his human mind in nature. We might define disgust as the sense of happiness lost, not in the past, but now.

At first it was disgust only in twinges at what he had written. "Burn," he says in a letter to a friend, "all the verses which I was fool enough to give you during my visits in Douai." This was well enough theoretically; he had entered on a new enterprise and could not afford to look back. But it was a bad omen if, to keep from looking back, he must lay waste the whole landscape.