Patti Smith in Arthur Rimbaud's House

Architectural Digest reveals that American singer, songwriter, playwright, and poet Patti Smith recently purchased 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud's house located in Roche, France, near the border with Belgium. The house, Rimbaud's childhood home, is where, at the age of 19, he wrote A Season in Hell. As AD rightly notes, "The extended poem, which is nearly 100 pages long, marked a departure from previous poetry and opened a new path toward surrealism." Let's pick up there:

The reconstruction of Rimbaud's home has in recent years been spearheaded by Jacqueline Kranenvitter and Paul Boens, two ardent supporters of the late 19th-century poet. Over the last few decades, Rimbaud's childhood home—which has become a pilgrimage site for fans of the writer—had begun to fall apart. That's when Smith decided to step in. During a recent trip to Paris to receive the Grand Vermeil Medal (a ceremony where she mentioned Rimbaud in her acceptance speech), Smith discreetly signed the papers to buy the symbolic home. To date, the amount she paid for the home has not be made public.

For Smith, who late last year sung a Bob Dylan song at his Nobel Prize ceremony in Sweden, the recently purchased home seems both like a dream come true as well as a civic duty to properly maintain a home so intertwined with modern poetry.