1 - Guillaume Apollinaire’s Curiosities

Summary

‘It was on the train that took me back from Nice to Marseille’, Madeleine Pagès recalled in 1952, ‘that I met, on 1 January 1915, Guillaume Apollinaire.’ The young woman had been on her way home to French Algeria after having spent Christmas with her older brother, a second lieutenant in the French forces. On that wartime morning in Nice, she caught the train carrying bags full of souvenirs for her mother and her siblings, including porcelain figurines the size of a finger and a little vase adorned with blue flowers. Seated across from her was a man reading an illustrated magazine, Le Cri de Paris, with whom she picked up a conversation. They shared a sandwich and talked Villon and Verlaine. Then, ‘very quietly’, as Pagès remembered thirty-seven years later, he whispered: ‘I, too, am a poet.’ They exchanged addresses – one a gunner in training at the barracks in Nîmes, the other a teacher at a girls’ school in Lamur, just outside Oran. Apollinaire promised to send Pagès a copy of his first book of poems, Alcools, which had appeared in 1913. She could not recall whether they ever said a formal farewell, only that she began running, with a feverish haste, as soon as the train pulled into Marseille, desperate to make it to the docks on time. The poet chased her to the exit of the train station: ‘I felt his breath on my neck and his voice whispered: Au revoir, mademoiselle!’

While Madeleine Pagès safely made it across the Mediterranean, Alcools never did. Apollinaire's editor was in the army, his publishing house closed. The poet wrote to her months later, apologising for this delay and wondering if she recalled their serendipitous encounter between Nice and Marseille. On the evening of 4 May 1915, Apollinaire, who by then had travelled from the barracks in Nîmes to the front in Champagne, heard a military postman shout: ‘A parcel from Algeria for you.’ In addition to a letter – ‘But of course, dear Sir, I remember you’ – it contained cigars from Oran, which he readily shared with the men in his unit.