Abstract: Could the “Splendid Hotel” mentioned in “Après le Déluge” be one of the places in the “Splendid History” that Rimbaud evokes in his letter to Jules Andrieu of 16 April 1874? Their shared splendour is part of “The same bourgeois magic” through which the bourgeoisie exercises and relates its power, and it is this historical vision that the poet sets out to show and dismantle by inverting the meaning of the crushing of the Paris Commune and the radiance of the Crystal Palace.
