It has become rigueur to apologize for returning to Rimbaud's Voyelles when the intent is to suggest yet another critical view of the overworked sonnet. This essay, however, will begin with the approach already taken by Jean Richer: Voyelles is based on a specific series (admittedly variegated) of mystical symbols.' But I will argue here that the network of the sonnet's colors has as its foundation a code even more specific than Richer has suggested and that the application of such a code goes far to explain the mysterious valences of the poem. The sonnet is not a great one, but it reveals itself to be a clever riddle reminiscent of some of the verses of the troubadours; and, as in the devinalhs of William IX or the fourteenth-century inigmes, the very system of the riddle in Voyelles ultimately divulges more than the intended solution. Rimbaud's protestation (a little more than two years after Voyelles) that he had simply invented the colors of the vowels is in keeping with the rest of the sonnet's puzzle. The later recantation is more in the tone of a recusatio, one of the conventions with which the Provengal devinalh frequently began, than it is the confession of a mature poet. Farai un vers dreyt nien (I will write a verse on purely nothing), says William in the first line of one of his most famous devinalh. It is, of course, de dreyt nien only on the surface, for the key to its riddle (la contraclau, as the envoie says) was to render a perfectly intelligible tale. From the bawdy Duke of Aquitaine we expect such brazen mockery, but even if Rimbaud's sonnet is viewed as largely arbitrary in its fantastic equations, readers tend to overlook the underlying tone, which is as brazen and mocking as that of William. If Rimbaud's assertion, J'inventai la couleur des voyelles, is viewed as being quite similar in spirit to that of the often lighter devinalhs, then the remark may be seen as continuing, rather than discounting, the riddle of the sonnet-a riddle which, moreover, the second line of Voyelles coolly promises one day to solve. It is the system inherent in Rimbaud's nineteenth-century devinalh which we shall examine-not for the purpose of admiring the poem with more or less avidity, but in order to decipher the possible meaning of the color symbols and to demonstrate that the very choice of semiology in Voyelles is of equal significance. Denis Saurat had argued in 1936 that both Baudelaire and Rimbaud received many of their ideas from the cabala, though they had greatly simplified them.2 He added that the vowels together spell the name of God (IAWE or IEOUA) and noted that the Hebraic letters have a numerology which is not unimportant to deciphering Rimbaud's sonnet. But the Saurat article is brief and unconvincingprincipally because it does nothing to prove the significance of its claims with respect to the poem itself. Richer's excellent study, L'Alchimie du verbe Rimbaud, takes up what Saurat barely begins. Citing everything from Agrippa's Philosophie occulte (1727) to Histoire la magie by Eliphas Levi, and drawing from those