Le poète assassiné.

Portrait frontispiece by André Rouveyre.

8vo (188x 135mm.) 316pp. Loose in original printed pictorial wrappers (by Cappelio), with glassine jacket, advertisements on lower cover (upper wrapper detached, spine tilted, small tear at head of lower wrapper).   

Paris: L’Edition Bibliothèque des curieux, 1916.

First edition of Le poète assassiné, (pp. 1-141) written between 1900 and 1913, of which the hero is a a poet, friend of artists, called Croniamantal. In chapter 10 (of 18) we meet the Benin Bird (l'oiseau Benin) who is Picasso;Apollinaire owned  a 19th-century Benin Bird made of copper and wood and here makes a play on the name of the painter Paolo Uccello (=Pablo Picasso). It was Picasso who introduced the poet to Marie Laurencin, in the story called Tristouse Ballerinette 'destined to make men suffer'. She became his lover and who in 1909 painted a canvas (Centre Pompidou) of Apollinaire and his friends which was once owned by him.

The second text is Le roi-lune,  followed by other short pieces, all of them dedicated to different friends. Le poète is dedicated to René Delize. The upper cover shows the poet blood streaming from his head, mounted on a horse with no stirrups. Rouveyre's drawing equally shows him with head bandaged. Apollinaire had been wounded in the right temple `on 17 March 1916.

Provenance: signature of Georges Crahay (?1885-1958), possibly the same Crahay who was a member of the Association pour le progrès intellectuel et artistique en Wallonie, formed clandestinely in 1944 during the German occupation of Belgium.

Talvart & Place I, 80.

Stock Code: 228515