The Spiritual Hunt

The poem was first mentioned by Paul Verlaine, who claimed to have forgotten its manuscript back with his wife Mathilde in Paris, after leaving the capital for Brussels to reunite with Rimbaud in July 1873.

"[1] Almost sixty years after Rimbaud's death, on 19 May 1949, Pascal Pia – who by that time had already published three authentic texts by Rimbaud (but who was also known as a forger of Apollinaire, Baudelaire and Radiguet) – to the amazement of the French literary scene, presented for the first time the supposed text of The Spiritual Hunt; extracts of the poem appeared in the newspaper Combat before the integral poem was published a few days later by Mercure de France.

However, in a long essay titled "Flagrant crime" and published in Le Figaro in July 1949, André Breton exposed the work as a forgery,[4] and pointed Akakia Viala, a theatre director, and Nicolas Bataille, an actor, as the authors of the fake.

[2] Both Viala and Bataille admitted the crime, claiming that the text had been intended as a revenge on the Rimbaldians who had savagely criticized their recent staging of A Season in Hell and that it had been published without their knowledge.

[2] After Breton's pamphlet, the text was republished as a Rimbaldian pastiche, but the press had turned the affair into a huge international scandal, out of which Nadeau never recovered, and "whose repercussions are hard to imagine today".