Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell)

The author-financed Brussels original of 1873 is the true first and the only book Rimbaud published himself; the census note is confirmed on this point. Rimbaud never settled the printer's bill, took away only about seven to a dozen copies for friends (Verlaine among them), and the balance of the run stayed in the printer's premises undistributed. In 1901 the Belgian bibliophile Léon Losseau found the forgotten stock in Brussels and recovered roughly 425 sound copies, destroying those spoiled by damp — which is why the surviving census is dominated by the Losseau find and why the long-repeated story that Rimbaud burned the edition is false. No contemporaneous UK or US edition exists, so there is no cross-border precedence question. The traps are later editions and reproductions, not rival firsts: the 1892 L. Vanier (Paris) collective volume Poèmes. Les Illuminations. — Une saison en enfer, with Verlaine's notice, is a first collective edition and is frequently offered in language that blurs it with 1873; Genonceaux's Reliquaire (Paris, 1891) is a different book entirely; and a facsimile of the 1873 original was published in 2023 for the sesquicentenary.