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On February 25, 1893, the poet Paul Verlaine arrived in Belgium, beginning a two-week lecture tour in a number of cities throughout the kingdom. Verlaine's speaking invitations spanned a variety of literary societies and cultural associations, from the avant-garde art group of Les Vingt, to the local Cercle Artistique of Antwerp and Ghent, to the Catholic university student association, the Cercle Léo XIII of Brussels.
Verlaine experienced the trip with great emotion, as it represented to him a great personal triumph and vindication. Twenty years earlier, in January of 1873, Verlaine had stood accused, humiliated, and condemned in a Brussels courtroom. Arrested for wounding Rimbaud with a gunshot that grazed his lover's wrist during one of their arguments, Verlaine received a maximum sentence and served almost two years in the desolate prison at Mons. During this period, Verlaine rekindled his Catholic faith, charting the spiritual journey of his reconversion in a collection of poems written in prison, Sagesse, published in 1881. While Verlaine's friends and correspondents among Belgian literary modernists, such as Maurice Maeterlinck, Emile Verhaeren, and Georges Rodenbach were conversant with the full range of his complex oeuvre, it was the prayerful fervor of Sagessse that was singularly well known to the broader literate public, and which stimulated the many invitations of 1893.
On this first trip back to Belgium after his ignominious incarceration, then, Verlaine arrived apprehensive, and excited. Fearing that his criminal record could be used against him in