The next time you’re itching to dress Kodona – comme un garçon victorien – call upon the ghost of French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Ah, quelle histoire! As a boy, Rimbaud often wandered to neighboring countries and had to be brought home by the police. The poetry bug bit at age 16. Soon after, Rimbaud may have joined the Paris Commune and was possibly gang-raped by soldiers. The poet became a street-dwelling anarchist, complete with long hair, shabby clothes, and body lice – not unlike kids today, eh? He moved into the home of Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, who promptly fell for the sullen blue-eyed teen and abandoned his pregnant wife for him. The pair ran to London and took up la vie bohème, spiking it with absinthe, opium, and hashish. They traveled; they fought; in Brussels, a drunk and raving Verlaine shot at his lover and hit him in the wrist. Quand il a realisé que Verlaine avait perdu la tête, the boy had him arrested. Verlaine was subjected to a humiliating interrogation of his lifestyle and sentenced to prison for two years.

+ Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), 1873.