Abstract: It seems that as a child, Verlaine was scalded with burning water and that he had an unexpected encounter with a scorpion. These facts are recounted in Les Hommes d’Aujourd’hui and, very differently, in his Confessions. The supposedly vivid recollections were revised and whatever their degree of referential precision, the aim was to suggest an early initiation to the status of “poète maudit”, already heading for existential heterodoxy.
