by R. A. Scotti
Although everything about la bande de Picasso, their art and their attire, was calculated to make a statement, to break from the past and express their freedom and freshness, they created their revolutionary art within certain bourgeois conventions: Saturday evenings at Rue de Fleurus with the Steins; Tuesday-night poetry readings at the Closerie des Lilas; Wednesday-night daube de boeuf dinners at Apollinaire's apartment.
4
AS THE BARON'S CONFESSIONS galvanized Paris, Apollinaire grew increasingly alarmed. When Picasso's train pulled into the station, the frantic poet was waiting on the platform. The police had searched his apartment, he said, and Picasso's would be next.
By September 1911, Picasso and Fernande had moved a few blocks from the grungy studio in le bateau-lavoir to an airy bourgeois apartment on Boulevard de Clichy “Fernande began to buy furniture and have a servant and the servant of course made a souffle,” Gertrude Stein wrote. Gertrude's friend Etta Cone found the Picassos “appalling but romantic.” Their new apartment was often full of friends, “but on the whole, they were not as happy as they had been.”
At the Boulevard de Clichy apartment, Picasso and Apollinaire plotted their next moves. They were not innocents in L'Affaire des Statuettes. Buried in the back of a Norman cupboard within easy reach were two figures—a small, powerfully built stone man and woman carved by the ancient Spaniards during the Bronze Age. The bottom of each bore the stamp:PROPERTY OF THE MUSéE DU LOUVRE.
Painter and poet were expatriates—Picasso was a Spanish citizen, and Apollinaire was a man without a country.∗7 They were afraid of being deported or worse.
Political anarchists were loose in the streets of Europe. In the first decade of the new century, anarchists assassinated three heads of state: Umberto I of Italy in 1900; U.S. president William McKinley the following year; and Russian premier Pyotr Stolypin in 1911. The political and social forces that would lead to the first world war were gathering. In Paris, the Bonnot Gang, armed with repeating rifles and the first getaway cars—more sophisticated equipment than the police had—was agitating the Third Republic. In the Bonnot version of criminal anarchy, the state had no legitimate authority, so every law could be broken. The Bonnot Gang's crimes were rash and violent—murder, bank robberies, and auto, not art, theft. But the police made no distinction between political and cultural anarchists—the “motor bandits” and the émigré artists. Being young, foreign, and male was enough to arouse their suspicion.
Apollinaire and Picasso acted like guilty men, concocting elaborate scenarios to elude the police. First they made plans to flee the country, then abandoned them. Next they hatched a plot to destroy the incriminating evidence. They would pack the stolen goods in an old suitcase and drop it in the Seine at midnight. They pictured themselves as actors in a drama, and they were certain the ending would be tragic.
On the night of September 5, a gang of four—Picasso and Fernande, Apollinaire and Marie—sat nervously around the dining room table in the Montmartre apartment. Although none of them knew the first thing about cards, like two-bit gangsters and their molls in a B movie, they pretended to play all through the interminable evening.
At the stroke of twelve, painter and poet slunk out to dispose of their contraband. Even following an arrowlike route, the distance from Montmartre to the Seine is probably three miles. They walked the distance because they were afraid to attract attention by lugging a suitcase in a cab or carriage. By the time they reached the river, they were already tired.
Picture the pair—Picasso, small and sullen, and Apollinaire, robust and ribald—skirting the Right Bank in the dead of night, Apollinaire bent at a downward angle and Picasso reaching up because one was so much taller than the other, toting their cheap, scuffed valise, the clothes from the cérét vacation dumped out and replaced with the Louvre stash. At first, they tried to carry the valise between them, but they were too mismatched in size, and so they took turns.
The water was dark, the lamplight picking out the ripples and undulations. They followed the quai, which was some thirty feet below street level. Ivy obscured the stone retaining walls and wrapped around the iron rings where merchant ships once moored. The trees from the street above, mostly chestnuts, leaned toward them, and the trees that bordered the river, mostly planes, reached up. The sky, only a shade lighter than the river, was low and overcast, with no stars to steer by, and blotted out for the most part by the trees and shrubs.
They looked constantly over their shoulders, starting at the slightest sound, fearful of every footstep behind them. Electricity was coming slowly to the City of Lights. In the shadows cast by the uncertain gas flames, they imagined uniformed figures flattened against tree trunks and crouched on the riverbank.
Two hours later, they returned to the studio, trudging up the steep hills of Montmartre, puffing, breathless, exhausted by their paranoia as much as by their aborted mission, still carrying the suitcase and its contents. They had never mustered the courage to act.
Apollinaire spent what remained of the night at the apartment, and in the morning, Picasso brought the incriminating evidence to the Paris-Journal. ∗8
5
ALTHOUGH THE NEWSPAPER had promised anonymity, the next day, September 6, l'Affaire des Statuettes was again a page-one story:
WHILE AWAITING MONA LISA
THE LOUVRE RECOVERS ITS TREASURE
TWO NEW RESTITUTIONS ARE MADE TO PARIS-
JOURNAL —THE POSSESSOR OF THE TWO OTHER STOLEN
STATUETTES MENTIONED BY “OUR THIEF” TURNS
THEM IN TO US. THE STONE MAN AND THE STONE
WOMAN ARE IDENTIFIED BY THE ADMINISTRATION.
Paris-Journal recently restored to the Louvre an antique bust, an example of Iberian art by now famous under the incorrect designation of “Phoenician statuette” employed by the thief, whose curious account of the affair we printed without change.
Our readers will not have forgotten that in this account he mentioned other statues stolen from the Louvre a few years ago and sold to an art lover. It was not specified whether the sculptures had been bought in good faith or whether the art lover knew their provenance.
THE TYPEWRITTEN LETTER
Yesterday our mail contained a letter written on a typewriter. This document emanated from the mysterious art lover whose identity neither the cleverness of our fellow newspapermen nor the professional skill of the police has as yet been able to discover.
He asked us, of course, to promise discretion, and offered to come in person in the event that we cared to take the responsibility of returning the stolen statues to the Louvre without involving him….
THE STONE MAN AND THE STONE WOMAN
Our visitor had brought with him the sculptures in question. They correspond to the summary description provided by the thief. One is a man's head with an enormous ear, and the other the head of a woman whose hair is rolled into a kind of twist. The dimensions are approximately those of the statue which we previously restored to the Louvre.
YES, THESE ARE BOTH OBJECTS STOLEN
FROM THE LOUVRE!
At the Louvre, the curator in charge of these antiquities, M. Pottier, declared: “Yes, these are the two objects. They are two fine works from the period corresponding to the end of the Roman Republic.”
6
WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after the story appeared, Apollinaire was under arrest. On the evening of September 7, two detectives paid a return visit to 37 Rue Gros in Auteuil. They spent an hour combing through the apartment. “Without their help, my correspondence would never have been filed,” Apollinaire would joke later. At the time, though, he was too apprehensive to see any humor in his predicament.
The detectives questioned Apollinaire's concierge and neighbors. Was he a sinister character? Had they noticed any suspicious goings-on or deviant behavior? Did he bring home little boys or girls? Anything at all that aroused concern? Later, Apollinaire would say the experience “made me understand the man who said that, if he were accused o
f stealing the bells of Notre-Dame, he would take to his heels immediately.”
There was something of Pierrot, the clown with the tear in his eye, in Apollinaire. He was a paradox—a man with legions of friends, yet alone, making everything up, especially himself, and never quite sure if he had pulled it off. He was the dutiful son who never pleased, the loyal friend who would be betrayed, but he had enormous courage on many levels. As Jorge Luis Borges would write, Apollinaire “was a man of elemental, and therefore, eternal feelings; he was, when the fundaments of earth and sky shook, the poet of ancient courage and ancient honor.”
He was born Guillaume Albert Wladimir AlexAndré Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky in Rome in the summer of 1880 and nicknamed Kostro. His father was unknown, although Apollinaire liked to hint that a Vatican cardinal might have been in his lineage. His mother was a Polish aristocrat who was expelled from her convent school—the Trinità dei Monti, at the top of the Spanish Steps—and became a femme galante in the casino in Monte Carlo. She was “an adventuress, to put it politely,” Max Jacob said, and the boy Kostro grew up sharing his mother with a series of “uncles.”
In Paris in 1902, he shed Kostro and invented himself as Apollinaire. When asked once for a biographical sketch, he wrote: “I don't know what to say. I have no past, and for that reason I should be happy, like peoples without history. … My assets consist of a total lack of money, a knowledge of literature that I believe extensive, a few languages living and dead, and a rather varied experience of life….”
Like so many aspiring poets, Apollinaire scrambled for sustenance and success. He was variously a bank clerk, an art critic, a poet, and a pornographer. As voluble as Picasso was withdrawn, Apollinaire possessed a mixture of nobility and vulgarity, energy and intelligence. For a while, he wrote a column about women authors under the pseudonym Louise Lalanne. (When he tired of the column, he announced that Mademoiselle Lalanne had been abducted by an army officer.) He also edited a series of erotic classics, including the works of the Marquis de Sade, whom he rescued from obscurity. De Sade's definition of art as “the perpetual immoral subversion of the existing order” captured Apollinaire's imagination, imbued his criticism, and came to define the new art.
Apollinaire was a passionate proselytizer, presenting modern art to a world not yet ready to embrace it. He provided the intellectual framework and the rationale for much of the art of the twentieth century. The pure freedom he discovered in the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade was a profound influence, underlying his iconoclasm, his openness to experimentation in art and life, and the imagination he brought to the creation of new canons. In his book Les peintres cubistes, Apollinaire expounded on the theory and psychology of cubism. He gave a name and a conceptual context to orphism, and he coined the word “surrealism.” Although he was roundly mocked as an obtuse critic and huckster by those he bolstered, he gave legitimacy and attention to Picasso and to many other painters, writers, and musicians.
“Guillaume was extraordinarily brilliant,” Gertrude Stein wrote, “and no matter what subject was started, if he knew anything about it or not, he quickly saw the whole meaning of the thing and elaborated it by his wit and fancy carrying it further than anybody knowing anything about it could have done, and oddly enough generally correctly.”
She rather grandly described him as having the head of a Roman emperor. In reality, it more closely resembled a potato. The dominant feature was a perfect Pythagorean triangle of a nose, closely abutted by small, birdlike eyes and eyebrows like recumbent commas. For someone who discoursed continuously and with such consequence, it is surprising that his mouth was his most meager feature, the lips like slivers of pimento stuck on a large, doughy face.∗9
He was his own singular creation, a large man physically, with large appetites for life, art, and friendship. He dressed in English wool regardless of the season, because to someone always trying to overcome his bastard birth and reprobate mother, the British epitomized respectability, and he rarely ventured out without a pipe clenched in his mouth and a hat, which always appeared too small and precariously perched on his large head.
Where Picasso was cocky, Apollinaire was exuberant. Striding across Paris from end to end, writing poetry as he walked, he composed his own autobiography. It was a work of fiction he could live by, a story that would make him legitimate and match his enormous enthusiasms. As Kostro, he had grown up always thinking on his feet, embroidering stories to get by, one step ahead of the law—dodging creditors and absconding from hotels in the dead of night. On September 7, the law caught up with him.
7
THE ARREST OR Guillaume Apollinaire was a startling development in a startling crime. The “pope of cubism”∗10 was transported in handcuffs to the Palais de Justice, where he was arraigned before Magistrate Drioux. The proceedings lasted well into the night. Apollinaire was told that anonymous sources had linked him to L'Affaire des Statuettes—specifically, that he had been in contact with the thief who signed himself Baron d'Ormesan and that he had received the stolen sculptures recently returned to the Paris-Journal. If he did not identify the baron, he would be charged with harboring a criminal, possession of stolen goods, and thwarting a police investigation. For hours, Apollinaire refused to provide any information. Finally, after prolonged and fruitless questioning, Judge Drioux signed an arrest warrant. Aghast at the prospect of imprisonment, Apollinaire reluctantly complied.
The Louvre Thief, Baron Ignace d'Ormesan, was Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret, a Belgian in his early thirties who had been living in Apollinaire's apartment and working for him as a secretary of sorts. Apollinaire's fictional d'Ormesan describes himself as “an artist… and what is more,” he says, “I invented my branch of art myself, and am the only one to practice it.” By all accounts, the real Géry was matinee-idol handsome, blithely amoral, probably bisexual, and absolutely irresponsible. His father, a prominent lawyer in Brussels, had committed suicide, and his bereaved mother paid her prodigal son to leave home permanently.
Géry was a disarming and polished social parasite, a vagabond in the engaging French tradition of troubadours, living by his wits and his charm, always tempting fate. He spent four years gallivanting in the American West, then returned to Paris. Like Picasso and Apollinaire, Géry loved the circus. They went to the Medrano Circus most weeks. Picasso painted his harlequins and street performers, Apollinaire put them in his poems, and Géry became a circus promoter. When he wasn't galloping around Paris naked except for chaps, a cowboy hat, and a set of sandwich boards, he stole artifacts from the Louvre as a lark. It was a diversion and favorite pastime. As he was leaving Apollinaire's apartment in the mornings, he would say to Marie, “I'm on my way to the Louvre. Anything I can pick up for you?” Incriminating the Picasso gang was another lark.
In Apollinaire's story, Baron d'Ormesan asks, “Which of us has not a crime on his conscience? … For my part, I no longer even count them. But I have committed several which have brought me in quite a lot of money. And if I am not a millionaire today, my appetites rather than my scruples are to blame.”
D'Ormesan goes on to tell Apollinaire's first-person narrator, “You are the only person in whom I can confide, because I have known you for so long, and know also that you will never betray me.”
Once he revealed Géry's identity, Apollinaire expected to be freed. Instead, he was taken to Le Sante prison, where he was stripped, searched, and locked in a cell. The next day, he was grilled again for hours. Apollinaire admitted that on the now infamous date of August 21, he had bought Géry a train ticket to Marseilles, packed up his friend's belongings, and urged him to leave the country. Instead of being safely out of France, Géry had resurfaced five days later and sold his story to the Paris-Journal.
The circumstantial evidence against Apollinaire was damning. Although Géry was a restless rogue never long in one place, Apollinaire always put him up during his various sojourns in Paris and often found him work. He knew that Géry had been in possession of stolen
art that originated in the Louvre, yet he had sheltered him, and more damaging, he had aided and abetted his friend's aborted getaway. Mona Lisa and Baron d'Ormesan disappeared on the same day—she from the Louvre, he from Apollinaire's apartment.
Prefect Lépine was confident he had apprehended a ringleader in the international gang of art thieves he had been hunting. All the pieces—target, motive, and opportunity—implicated Apollinaire in Mona Lisa's abduction. It only remained for the poet-provocateur to identify his accomplices. Lépine wanted the names of Géry's other “colleagues”—particularly the painter who had bought the stolen statues. When Apollinaire did not comply, Lépine warned that, unless he cooperated and named the painter, everyone close to him—his mother, Marie, and his brother—would be brought in for questioning and their homes searched. Eventually, Apollinaire gave his interrogators the name they wanted. Even then he tried to protect his friend, insisting Picasso had been “taken advantage of” and never knew the antiquities came from the Louvre.
Picasso and Fernande had been waiting anxiously for word from Apollinaire. “Hearing nothing from our friend, we were worried,” she recounted, “but we didn't dare go and see him.” Apollinaire had been detained for more than thirty-six hours before news of his arrest broke in Le Matin. Over a picture of the poet in handcuffs, the headline of September 9 read:
JUDGE DRIOUX ARRESTS AN ART CRITIC,
M. GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE, IN CONNECTION
WITH THE EGYPTIAN STATUETTES STOLEN
FROM THE LOUVRE
It was not without emotion and surprise that Paris learned last night of the arrest made by the Sûreté in connection with the recent restitution of Phoenician statuettes stolen from the Louvre in 1907.