[Verlaine] moved more and more in an artistic milieu. Every week he attended a salon frequented by the composers Berlioz and Wagner and the painters Édouard Manet and Henri Fantin-Latour and all the Parnassan band, who grew accustomed to Verlaine's habits; when he started drinking absinthe, they made sure to hide the knives. They knew that in a matter of moments he could go from the meekest mildness to the most murderous and ungovernable of rages. One night when he was blind with drink and wanted money from his mother so that he could continue his rout into the dawn hours, he became so angry with her for holding out on him that he attacked with his cane the jars containing Madame Verlaine's miscarriages, smashing the glass and dismembering the tiny rubbery fetuses and scattering them across the floor - and remarking soddenly that they, like him, had been macerating in alcohol long enough. The next morning, Verlaine crawled to his mother's side, begging her forgiveness in a prolonged, tearful scene of penitence. As she would do each time for the rest of her days, she forgave him.
(Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, 2008)
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