In front of you is one of the most elegant hotels in Brussels, but its name harks back to something far less welcoming. From 1522 this site was the city prison.

1A prison called “friend”

In Dutch the prison was known as the vrunte. According to the traditional explanation, sixteenth-century Spanish soldiers confused it with vriend, “friend”, in Spanish amigo, and the name stuck. Among those who passed through its cells, according to the chronicles, were the famous Vidocq and the poet Paul Verlaine. The prison was demolished in 1930 and the hotel opened in 1958, for the World’s Fair.

210 July 1873

Verlaine ended up here because of what happened a few metres away, at the Hôtel À la Ville de Courtrai, at number 1 Rue des Brasseurs. He and the young Arthur Rimbaud were in a stormy relationship that had blown up in London. That morning Verlaine bought a revolver in the Galeries Saint-Hubert. Back in the room, after a quarrel, he fired twice: one bullet wounded Rimbaud in the wrist.

“Il faut être absolument moderne”, the plaque reminds us with a line from Rimbaud: “One must be absolutely modern.”

Verlaine was arrested, held in the Amigo prison and sentenced to two years in jail, which he served in Mons. The two poets were never the same again. In 2016 the revolver sold at auction in Paris for 434,500 euros.

3What to look for

  • The 1991 plaque on Rue des Brasseurs, put up for the centenary of Rimbaud’s death.
  • The bilingual street name: Rue de l’Amigo and Vruntstraat.
  • The back of the Town Hall, just a few steps away.
Plaque on Rue des Brasseurs recalling the day Verlaine shot Rimbaud
The 1991 plaque on the site of the former Hôtel À la Ville de Courtrai.

Documented

The site was the city prison from 1522; on 10 July 1873 Verlaine wounded Rimbaud at the hotel at Rue des Brasseurs 1 and was sentenced to two years in prison.

Oral tradition

The idea that the name “Amigo” came from a mix-up by Spanish soldiers is a traditional explanation, not a proven fact.

Sources and credits

Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles; Graham Robb, “Rimbaud” (Picador, 2000); La Libre Belgique, “Quand Verlaine tira sur Rimbaud” (2004); French Wikipedia, “Hôtel Amigo”.

Photos:

  • Brick façade of the Hotel Amigo, next to the Grand-Place: Benoît Prieur, CC0.
  • Plaque on Rue des Brasseurs recalling the day Verlaine shot Rimbaud: Michel wal, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Spotted a mistake? Drop us a line and we’ll look into it.