History, like so much of the shallow end of our contemporary world, is all-too-often just a matter of celebrities, whether from the A or the B list, people you have heard of for doing nothing of any real significance, worth remembering if you take part in pub quizzes, but forgettable at about the same time as the hangover wears off.
There are vast amounts of history, especially the documentary evidence, that we would discard as banal and insignificant, were it not for the vaguely famous name that happened to be attached. What would a genuine Aristotle shopping list fetch at auction? Or a hankie blown into by Picasso, its DNA verified. And how many websites and PhD theses would they furnish, seeking to deduce the significance of Aristotle's preference for goat cheese over cow cheese, say, or cauliflower over broccoli, or an indication that Picasso may once have had flu?
This letter is from Alfred Ilq, Swiss adviser to King Menelik II of Ethiopia, and it was sent on October 8th 1889:
"I must reproach you for one thing where the caravans are concerned. You never give them sufficient provision. Not a single caravan arrives but it is starved and the personnel in a deplorable condition; everyone complains very bitterly about you. It simply is not worth it, in order to save a few sous on provisions, to have the personnel and drivers all sick and worn out for several months. The same is true of the camel loads. In your donkey train with the silk and cretonne I had to pay six dollars for transport per thousand dollars, since the donkeys you provided would no longer walk… Donkeys can walk for a long time only when they are not overloaded. All the donkeys that arrived from Harar are in such pitiful condition that I have been obliged to turn them all out in my fields to let them heal their sores; not one of them was usable…"
The recipient of this letter was the retired poet, now thirty-five years old, Arthur Rimbaud.
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David Prashker
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