Vanished Smile

by R. A. Scotti

  The mere name of the person arrested is enough to account for this reaction. He is M. Guillaume Kostrowsky [sic], known in literature and art as Guillaume Apollinaire… author of a book entitled L'Hérésiarque et cie, which was a candidate for the last Prix Goncourt.

  Such is the man who was arrested the night before last on the order of M. Drioux, on the charge of “harboring a criminal.” What exactly are the charges against him? Both the public prosecutor and the police are making a considerable mystery of the affair.

  “Without endangering progress already made,” Le Matin was informed, “we can say nothing except that we are on the trail of a gang of international thieves who came to France for the purpose of despoiling our museums.”

  Apollinaire was one of the most public and popular members of the artistic community of Paris, and his arrest caused such a sensation that Magistrate Drioux was forced to issue a formal statement defending the action. The investigation had “collected evidence tending to show that Guillaume Apollinaire had transgressed against the penal code,” the judge wrote. “I will add that his arrest appeared to me to be indispensable to the prosecution of the search made with a view to discovering the Louvre thieves.”

  The Paris Herald reported: “The police believe the theft of the three statuettes to have been the work of a gang of international museum thieves and that this same gang is responsible for the disappearance of la Gioconda.” According to Lépine's strained logic, if gang members had possessed the primitive statues stolen from the Louvre, it only remained to uncover where they had stashed the other missing work.

  As the story of Apollinaire's arrest broke in the morning paper, the police were rounding up the other ringleader.

  8

  NINETEEN DAYS AFTER Mona Lisa disappeared, the police paid a visit to Boulevard de Clichy. Picasso, who liked to sleep until noon, was roused at seven a.m. by a persistent knocking at the door. A groggy Fernande, her eyes little more than slits, a gossamer dressing gown wrapped around her extravagant body, opened the door.

  The studio presented a scene of eclectic chaos with no concern for color, order, or harmony. In the early light, the chalky silhouette of the Sacré-Coeur gleamed through a high window, looking more like a stage set than a place where sins were confessed and sacrifice offered. Easels and canvases shared studio space with ceremonial African figures, an immense Louis-Philippe couch upholstered in violet velvet with gold buttons, and stolid, ungainly, secondhand furniture that Fernande referred to as Picasso's “Louis XIV style.” Suspended randomly and at odd angles on the walls were tattered Aubusson tapestries, primitive masks, battered musical instrument cases, chipped gilt frames, and a lovely, small Corot painting of a woman. Picasso was a compulsive collector.

  Six dark, suspicious eyes and six cool baby blues stared from the clutter. The dark eyes belonged to Picasso, now wide awake and trembling with fear; his chattering monkey, Molina; and his white dog, Frika, who looked more like an unshorn sheep than a canine. The baby blues belonged to Picasso's trio of Siamese cats. All eyes were fixed on the intruder.

  The detective read a summons from the safety of the doorway, ordering Picasso to appear before the examining magistrate Henri Drioux for questioning. The artist was suspected of dealing in art stolen from the Louvre.

  According to Fernande: “Géry, whom Apollinaire had taken to see Picasso, had given the painter two quite beautiful little stone statues, without revealing where he had got them from. He had only said that they should not be exhibited too conspicuously. Picasso was enchanted, and he treasured these gifts.” Fernande's account is either naive or disingenuous.

  Isolated by the natural barrier of the Pyrenees, the Iberians sculpted a powerful primitive archetype that affected Picasso profoundly. He had visited the Louvre exhibit several times, and he had probably heard the flamboyant Belgian boast of his light-fingered activities. At the very least, Picasso knew the statues he had bought from Géry belonged to the museum. At worst, he may have commissioned their theft, ordering two specific figures from the exhibit, describing exactly which pieces he wanted to use in his new painting—a large, disturbing brothel scene that André Salmon would name Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

  If the detective had searched Picasso's studio, he would have found the incriminating evidence. When the police came calling that September morning, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was still in a corner. Picasso had finished the canvas in March 1907 and had shown it to a handful of friends. Even for these avant-garde pioneers, Les Demoiselles registered as a deliberate act of scandal. Braque said Picasso was “making us eat cotton waste or swallow gasoline, so we can spit free.” Others called it “a shout of insurrection and rage,” “a return to barbarism and primitive savagery.” Apollinaire was uncharacteristically reticent.

  Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, pretty much alone among the dealers, artists, and friends who saw the painting in Picasso's studio, recognized what he was seeing. He bought all the preliminary drawings and studies and would have bought the canvas, too, but Picasso put it away again. In a 1961 interview, Kahnweiler said: “I could not put a label on it. The picture Picasso had painted seemed to everyone mad or monstrous at the same time. There was something painful and beautiful there, and oppressive but imprisoned.”∗11 Reaction was so intense that, four years after finishing it, Picasso had still never exhibited the painting publicly.

  Instead of searching the studio, the detective remained pinned at the door by the twelve watchful eyes while Picasso dressed. In an attempt at bravado, the painter chose his favorite red-and-white polka-dot cotton shirt and an elegant silk tie that clashed violently. He was shaking so uncontrollably that Fernande had to button the shirt for him. With his ashen face and vivid outfit, Picasso looked like one of his Rose-Period harlequins.

  He was taken by bus from Pigalle to the Palais de Justice. No police vehicle was available. The government would not pay the taxi fare for an alleged criminal, nor was a suspect permitted to spring for a cab. Picasso would never again take the bus that went from Pigalle to Halle aux Vins.

  While the police were picking up Picasso, Apollinaire was transported from his jail cell to the Palais de Justice. He was taken in “a kind of cage”†12 that was very tight quarters for such a large man and very hot. At eleven o'clock, he arrived at the courthouse, where he became the newest in a long line of illustrious and infamous prisoners. The assassin Ravaillac, who stabbed Henri IV; the royal favorite Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV; Charlotte Corday and her unrequited lover Adam Lux; Queen Marie Antoinette; and the revolutionaries Danton and Robespierre had all been held there while awaiting execution. Apollinaire spent the next four hours in a narrow and stinking holding cell, his face glued to the bars, straining to see who was passing in the corridor.

  At three o'clock, a guard led him handcuffed to the courtroom to be arraigned with his accomplice. As the door opened, he was swept up in a surge of reporters and photographers. Some fifty cameras were aimed at him, and the magnesium flashes startled and unnerved him. Later, Apollinaire would say, “I found myself suddenly stared at like a strange beast. … I think that I must have laughed and wept at the same time.”

  Apollinaire and Picasso faced each other across the courtroom like two strangers. Picasso appeared even smaller in that imposing hall of justice. His polka-dot shirt and clashing tie were a gesture of bravado that appeared more pathetic than defiant.

  After two days in jail, Apollinaire had a hollow, haunted aspect. He was gray and unshaven, his shirt unbuttoned, the collar torn. His three-piece beige wool suit, much too heavy for the terrible heat, was rumpled and ripped.

  The confrontation between the gang leaders had the dimensions of a comic opera gone awry. Seeing the large Apollinaire like “a lamentable scarecrow, gaunt and insubstantial,” affected Picasso. He would tell Fernande that he “became completely desperate. His heart failed him even more than it had in the morning when he was unable to dress himself, he was shivering so violently.”

  Painte
r and poet were so nervous that in their confusion and desperation to assert their own innocence, truth and friendship were forgotten. They contradicted themselves and each other, each accusing the other of bringing the stolen statues to the newspaper. Both men wept and begged for forgiveness and freedom.

  Apollinaire, after being grilled for hours like a criminal, had confessed to everything: harboring Géry, possessing stolen goods, signing a manifesto that called for burning down the Louvre. He had implicated and identified Géry and Picasso in the theft of the Iberian figures. Now Judge Drioux fixed on the painter. Glaring at Picasso through his pince-nez, he rasped out questions in his gravel voice. Picasso's tough-guy pose evaporated like color under turpentine. In his fear, he pleaded absolute ignorance. He swore that he knew nothing whatever about l'Affaire des Statuettes. He did not know the primitive Iberian heads were stolen goods, and he did not know Apollinaire. Like Simon Peter when asked, “Do you know this man?,” Picasso replied, “I have never seen him before.”

  9

  EXACTLY WHAT TRANSPIRED in that Paris courtroom before Judge Henri Drioux depends on who is telling the story. Apollinaire would recall sometime later: “I thought I was lost, but the investigating magistrate saw that I had done nothing, and was simply being victimized by police because I had refused to betray the fugitive to them, and he authorized me to question the witness; and using the maieutics dear to Socrates, I quickly forced X to admit that everything I had said was true.” “X,” of course, was Picasso, and “maieutics” was a word only Apollinaire could wield.

  Fernande gave a different version, minus both Socrates's method of eliciting the truth through clever questioning and Apollinaire's wordplay. Her account was gentler and, as always, protective of Picasso:

  He, too, could only say what the magistrate wanted him to say. In any case, Guillaume had sworn to so many things, true and false, that he had hopelessly compromised his friend—he was in such distress he would have compromised anyone…. It has been said that Picasso betrayed his friend and pretended he didn't know him. That is completely untrue. He certainly did not desert him, and in fact, his friendship for Apollinaire seemed to be even stronger afterward.

  At the end of the arraignment, Picasso, who had bought the stolen goods, was released on his own recognizance and warned not to leave Paris. For weeks afterward, he lived furtively. By nature brooding, he became paranoid, worried that he would be arrested again. He ventured out only at night, and then only in a taxi. He was convinced he was being shadowed and would switch cabs to shake his tail. He slept fitfully, always listening for another knock at his door.

  Apollinaire was returned to the Sante prison, still suspected of belonging to a gang of international art thieves. Géry, not without remorse—although it was late in coming—dashed off a wry note from Frankfurt to the Paris-Journal to exonerate his friend.

  It is deeply regrettable, it is indeed sad, that a kindly, honest, and scrupulous man like M. Guillaume Apollinaire should be made to suffer for a single moment because of the personal affairs of someone who was for him only a literary “subject.”

  —Baron Ignace d'Ormesan.

  With nothing to substantiate the gang of international thieves except Géry's fanciful fabrication, Apollinaire was released provisionally on September 13 after a final interrogation, but all charges were not dismissed until January 1912. Apollinaire's last appearance before Magistrate Drioux was very different from the previous ones. He knew his bad dream was ending, and with his wits and wit restored, he parried with the judge.

  The Paris-Journal ran the complete transcript:

  THE THEFTS IN THE LOUVRE

  RELEASE OF M. G. APOLLINAIRE

  THE PUBLIC PROSECUTOR REALIZES THAT THE

  CHARGES MADE AGAINST THE AUTHOR OF

  “L' HÉRÉSIARQUE ET CIE” ARE WITHOUT BASIS.

  It was 3 o'clock when Apollinaire, pushing through the crowd of reporters, photographers and friends from the worlds of journalism, letters and the arts, come to bring him the comfort of their sympathy, entered the magistrate's office. A policeman accompanied him. Apollinaire—we deplore this inadmissible harshness on the part of the prison authorities—was handcuffed. [This is] the individual described by the Sûreté as “chief of an international gang come to France to despoil our museums.” Even in the Sûreté they write novels—very bad ones!…

  The magistrate, fingering the meager dossier so laboriously compiled, first questioned him about the origin of his acquaintance with the famous “Baron d'Ormesan.”

  “You admit that even though you knew it was stolen, you kept that third statue, stolen in 1911, in your house from June 14th to August 21st?”

  Géry had stolen from the Louvre three times, twice in 1907 taking the statues that Picasso had bought, and a third time in 1911.

  “Certainly. It was in Géry's suitcase. I kept everything—the man, the suitcase and the statue in the suitcase. I assure you that I wasn't very happy about it, but I did not think that I was committing a serious crime.”

  “Such a degree of indulgence surprises me,” said M. Drioux, who had been following M. Apollinaire with interest.

  “Here is part of my reason,” said M. Apollinaire, “Géry is a little bit my creation. He is very queer, very strange, and after studying him I made him the hero of one of the last short stories in my L'Hérésiarque et cie. So it would have been a kind of literary ingratitude to let him starve.”

  “You bought, very recently, it has been alleged, a castle in the department of the Drôme?”

  “You must be referring to a castle in Spain. I have seen many of those evaporate.”

  “I have a letter here from someone who says that you borrowed two books from him, and that one of them, La Cite Gauloise, you never returned.”

  “I imagine his reason for lending them to me was that I might read them. I haven't read them yet. I will return them to him as soon as I can.”

  The moment he was released, Apollinaire went directly from the courtroom to the offices of the Paris-Journal and dashed off his own account of his jail term.

  “Mes Prisons” by Guillaume Apollinaire ran in the paper the next day. The account began:

  As soon as the heavy door of the Sante closed behind me, I had an impression of death. However, it was a bright night, and I could see that the walls of the courtyard in which I found myself were covered with climbing plants. Then I went through a second door, and when that closed, I knew that the zone of vegetation was behind me and I felt that I was now in some place beyond the bounds of the earth, where I would be utterly lost. I was questioned several times and a guard ordered me to take my “kit;” a coarse shirt, a towel, a pair of sheets, and a woolen blanket; and then I was taken through interminable corridors to my cell, No. 15, Section 11. There I had to strip naked in the corridor and was searched. I was then locked up. I slept very little because of the electric light that is kept on all night in the cells. Everybody knows what prison life is like: a purgatory of boredom, where you are alone and yet constantly spied on.

  Later, Apollinaire would call it “strange, incredible, tragic, and amusing all at once” that he was the only person arrested in France for the theft of Mona Lisa.

  IO

  L'AFFAIRE DES STATUETTES may have started as a practical joke instigated by the arts editor for the Paris-Journal with Géry's feckless collusion. André Salmon had lived in le bateau-lavoir. He was a friend of Apollinaire and Géry, and one of la bande de Picasso. Like all the actors in the tragicomedy that played to sold-out audiences in the newspapers and courtrooms of Paris, Salmon was impudent and ambitious.

  A slender man in every way—face, physique, and talent—with an acerbic charm, he was a lesser star to the twin suns of Apollinaire and Picasso. Perhaps that tempted him to exploit Géry's chronic quest for easy money. When the opportunity presented itself, Salmon may have devised a humorous ruse that got out of hand. It may have been irresistible to a clever mind like his—a prank, perhaps embarrassing, thoug
h with no malevolent intent—but it became something else, something much larger and damaging that he could not control.

  Salmon probably intended the “confessions” to be amusing, and they were, but, as noted before, the Paris police were not celebrated for their sense of humor. If he instigated the hoax, Salmon misjudged the mood of Paris, the magnitude of the Mona Lisa theft, the pressure on the police, and the backlash against the cultural anarchists—excoriated as foreign thieves despoiling the museums of Paris. Above all, he misjudged the depth of shame he would bring on his friends. Salmon never admitted that he had played a role in the affair, and he continued to write articles and books. His greatest success would come years later, in his memoirs of that band of creative brothers. In Souvenir sans fin, he would conjure again the romance of the Picasso gang that he, more than anyone, may have destroyed.

  As for Géry, he turned up the next year in Cairo, where he was arrested and eventually acquitted. In his fiction, Apollinaire wrote of Baron d'Ormesan, “Our numerous encounters … had given me occasion to appreciate his singular character, his lack of scruples, his somewhat disorderly erudition, and his agreeable and kindly disposition. …” In relaying the news of Géry's arrest, Apollinaire wrote, “The poor fellow was crazy rather than a criminal, the courts must have thought so, too.”

  With the detention of Apollinaire and Picasso, the theft of Mona Lisa assumed an added dimension—a clash of the twentieth-century contender with the Renaissance master. Leonardo's Mona Lisa was a climactic performance of the Renaissance. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was the opening act of modern art.

  Mona Lisa personified what the Picasso gang was rebelling against, and in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso painted her antithesis. He was becoming increasingly alienated from the empirical world that Leonardo had drawn from. He destroyed the perspective that Leonardo had mastered, and he obliterated the human face that Leonardo had perfected. The eternal Gioconda that could never be surpassed draws us in, holding us entranced. Picasso's whores “stare us down.”∗13