Le Poète assassiné
Paris, Bibliothèque des Curieux, 1916.
1 vol. (120 x 190 mm) of 316 p. and 1 f. Paperback, in folder and signed case (A. Devauchelle).
First edition.
Copy includes an autographed note (both sides, on 1 f. of school exercise book, 117 x 110).
We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.
Under a prescient title and cover, Apollinaire published a collection of stories in the autumn of 1916 that had been conceived before the war. He removed five of the initial writings and added a new one that inspired both the title and the cover design by Leonetto Cappiello, ‘The Case of the Masked Brigadier or The Poet Murdered’. When the collection was published, the poet was still convalescing after having been seriously wounded in the temple by a piece of shrapnel. Weakened by several trepanning operations, returned to civilian life and decorated with the Croix de Guerre, he returned to artistic and literary life: it was his friend André Rouveyre who sketched the portrait of ‘Second Lieutenant Guillaume Apollinaire’ that can be found on the frontispiece.
A very fine copy, admirably preserved: it is accompanied by an interesting autograph fragment which contains, on the back, notes relating to the Poet Assassinated. The first concerns ‘The Eagle Hunt’ (the 13th tale), whose subject – Napoleon’s son – would trouble Apollinaire throughout his life. He imagined other titles for this text at the time, such as ‘L’Homme au masque en bec’ (The Man with the Beak Mask), ‘Fils de l’Aiglon’ (Son of the Eaglet) and ‘Convocation de Vienne’ (Summoning of Vienna). This is followed by notes, undoubtedly plans for other tales or short stories: ‘the one who goes to the Gare du Nord every evening to pick up a stranger’; “the new Christ rabbi is retracing the Rhine – the wall is coming back in”; “The tirade – idea to be found”; “prostitute: the mother and her two sons in the same bed and not realising it” as well as an abstract drawing and the fragment of another.
On the back, there are ten lines of a text that refers more to the period of L’Hérésiarque and of which this is the original version, ‘Le Nom du diamant’ (The Name of the Diamond) which remained in the draft stage and was entitled in fine ‘Un vol à l’Elysée’ (A Robbery at the Elysée). Analysed by Jean-Louis Cornille in his Apollinaire et Cie, this tale depicts the adventures of Baron d’Ormesan, a character who also appears in L’Hérésiarque. The embryonic version recorded here by Apollinaire constitutes the synopsis, which differs from the final version (cf. Pléiade, OEuvres en prose), but the thread is there: a famous diamond, a dinner at the ambassador’s, a guest president who inadvertently swallows the diamond, an investigator who finds it in the presidential faeces, before being congratulated and decorated for his perspicacity!
The copy comes from the library of Marcel Adema, biographer and bibliographer of Guillaume Apollinaire; he was notably in charge of the edition of the Complete Works in La Pléiade and of the Apollinaire album devoted to the poet.
