Later he was decorated with the Croix de Guerre and described in a regimental dispatch as “an example of coolness and courage” (Adéma, 237).

LA GRENOUILLÈRE ↩

The title translates literally as “The Frog Pond.” La Grenouillère was the name of a popular open-air floating café–dance hall that also offered swimming and boating at the Ile de Croissy, seven miles west of Paris on the Seine. Apollinaire’s mother moved to nearby Le Vésinet in 1904, taking him and his brother with her, though the poet spent much of his time in Paris. The dance hall was immortalized in paintings (1869) by Monet and Renoir and in short stories by Maupassant. Women who were drawn to the scene were called Grenouilles (Frogs) and known to be “generous with their favors,” as the website for the Grenouillère Museum tactfully puts it.

THE GYPSY ↩

First published in 1907, this poem is another one that deals with the poet’s doomed love for Annie Playden.

THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD ↩

As a result of a stay in Munich in March and April 1902, Apollinaire wrote a story entitled “The Obituary,” which was published in 1907. Later he cut it up into lines and made some other revisions, creating this poem, which was published in 1909.

light-cavalrymen: Apollinaire makes the poem even ghostlier by adding these soldiers, whose category was eliminated from the French army in 1815.

HUNTING HORNS ↩

This melancholy poem derives from the end of Apollinaire’s love affair with the artist Marie Laurencin, as did “The Pont Mirabeau,” “Marie,” and to some extent “Zone.” The initial publication, in Les Soirées de Paris magazine in 1912, was accompanied by two other poems of his, “The Traveler” and “Fanny” (later renamed “Annie”; see the note on that poem).

Thomas de Quincey: De Quincey (1785–1859) was an English essayist best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. At the age of seventeen he had befriended an impoverished fifteen-year-old London streetwalker named Ann, then lost track of her and was haunted by her memory for the rest of his life. His book became well known in France through an 1828 adapation by Alfred de Musset. Apollinaire tried opium around 1910, but was initially unimpressed: “With opium the best and worst minds meet in the banality of ‘what’s the use?’” (Adéma, 131). In an article in L’Intransigeant (April 22, 1911), he mentioned de Quincey and Ann, and on May 3, in the same newspaper, made a knowing reference to opium. In Nice in late 1914 he joined a crowd of pleasure-seeking opium smokers, devotees of “the bamboo” (pipe).

IN LA SANTÉ ↩

In 1911 Apollinaire was jailed on suspicion of having been involved in the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. His five-day stay in La Santé prison (ironically, la santé translates as “health”) in Paris shook him, not only because being unjustly accused and jailed is depressing but also because it suggested the possibility of his being deported from France as an undesirable alien. Eventually he was released and the charges were dropped. Francis Steegmuller gives a detailed account of the matter in his Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters.

Apollinaire drafted “In La Santé” in jail, then reworked it, changing the title, shifting sections, and cutting. For documentation, including photos of his cell, go to www.wiu.edu/Apollinaire/Apollinaire_a_la_Sante_main.htm.

number fifteen in the Twelfth: Actually Apollinaire was assigned to cell fifteen in the eleventh section of the prison. I changed the section number for the off-rhyme with “myself.”

September 1911: Including a specific date gave this poem a contemporary charge. Apollinaire’s agreement with the publisher of Alcools (the volume the poem appeared in) was made only weeks after the incident.

INSCRIPTION FOR THE TOMB OF THE PAINTER
HENRI ROUSSEAU CUSTOMS INSPECTOR ↩

Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) painted Apollinaire twice, in 1908 and 1909. Both paintings are called The Muse Inspiring the Poet and depict him alongside Marie Laurencin. (The first is now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow; the second in the Kunstmuseum, Basel.) Rousseau received the nickname “the Customs Inspector” from Alfred Jarry, but in fact was, until his retirement in 1893, a clerk in the Paris city bureaucracy responsible for setting and collecting taxes on certain goods that entered the city.

Michel Décaudin, in his note on this poem in the Pléiade edition of Apollinaire’s Œuvres poétiques (1146), quotes from an article that Apollinaire published in Les Soirées de Paris in January of 1914: “In 1911, thanks to Robert Delaunay and to the Douanier’s landlord, we acquired a thirty-year concession and placed a tombstone with a medallion representing the departed, who lay not far from his friend Alfred Jarry. Finally in 1913 the sculptor Brancusi and the painter Ortiz de Zarate carved this epitaph on the tombstone, where I had written it in pencil.”

Delaunay his wife: The artists Robert (1885–1941) and Sonia (1885–1979) Delaunay.

Mister Queval: Rousseau’s landlord, who was also an engraver and sculptor. He made the medallion portrait on Rousseau’s headstone.

THE LADY ↩

Apollinaire published a version of this poem in 1903. It might well have been influenced by Verlaine’s poem of 1889, “Impression fausse”: “Dame souris trotte, / Noire dans le gris du soir, / Dame souris trotte / Grise dans le noir.” (“False Impression”: “Lady mouse trots, / Black in the evening’s gray, / Lady mouse trots / Gray in the dark.”)

THE LITTLE CAR ↩

This poem was written in several stages, beginning one month after the event described in it, which accounts for the accuracy of the speaker’s prognostication.

31st day of August: The actual date was July 31. The French order of mobilization came on August 1. Apollinaire’s “mistake” might be due to the first line’s having been a takeoff on the first line of a well-known popular song, “Le 31 du mois d’août,” which commemorated a French naval victory over the English in 1800.

Deauville: The French seaside town, where Apollinaire had gone with his friend and illustrator André Rouveyre on a journalistic assignment. Because his stay there was cut short, he wrote only one article, which contains a passage I cannot refrain from quoting: “On the morning of the 31st a wonderful negro in a gown shot with silver blue and dawn pink passed through the streets of Deauville on a bicycle. We saw him going down the Rue Gontaut-Biron in the direction of the beach. He finally reached the sea, into which, as it seemed to us, he plunged. Soon we could see nothing but the sea-green turban which mingled with the bitter waves” (Adéma, 196).

Francorchamps: A town in the Belgian Ardennes. Apollinaire had spent the summer of 1899 in nearby Stavelot.

Eau Rouge: A stream (literally “Red Water”) near Stavelot, so named for its high iron content.

mineral springs: In this area is the mineral-springs town of Spa, from which our word spa derives.

Versailles: In the calligrammatic image of the car, the front wheel contains v/ers/aille/s—Versailles with a lowercase v. The rear tire includes another town (Lisieux). The first draft of the poem gave Versailles with a capital V.