The Illuminations. Notes by Paul Verlaine.

FIRST EDITION limited to 200 copies. This copy is one of 170 numbered copies on Holland paper, second paper after 30 copies on Imperial Japan paper. A collection of 46 poems, 33 of which are in prose, published by Gustave Kahn in the May and June 1886 issues of La Vogue.

Before reaching the desk of Charles de Sivry, Verlaine's brother-in-law, and that of Gustave Kahn of La Vogue, the clean manuscript of Les Illuminations passed through the hands of Germain Nouveau, then in Brussels, around 1875.

While Verlaine's preface to the 1886 pamphlet – Rimbaud was then in Abyssinia – sheds light on the work's gestation and suggests that his farewell to literature in 1873 was not a definitive one, it does not fully unravel the mystery surrounding this second monument of Rimbaud's poetry and the role played by Germain Nouveau, the third member of an unparalleled trio.