APOLLINAIRE Guillaume (1880-1918)

Lot 9
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2000 - 3000 EUR
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Result : 2 210EUR
APOLLINAIRE Guillaume (1880-1918)
Smoke. La vie anecdotique, autograph manuscript signed March 1918. 4 in-8 pages in ink on paper, each one glued on an in-4 sheet. (Slight ink stain not affecting the text). Manuscript dedicated to tobacco, titled, signed and including corrections and erasures by Guillaume Apollinaire. Text published in the March 16, 1918 issue of the Mercure de France. "...] In a town in Italy, a few years before the war, one of those rich and sadistic Germans who translated their crude and complicated imaginations into splendidly banal settings asked me to go and see his books, his collection of fetishes from Oceania and Africa and his paintings by Gauguin. This man, whose name was of little importance, was trying to compete in refinement with what he had heard of some English people and in taste with what he knew of the French. Among his paintings there were a few fakes, and his fetishes had been chosen indiscriminately, and as for his books, I had no time to look at them. I was taken to a smoking room where the German upstart was sitting in a leather armchair smoking Egyptian cigarettes, while next to him, naked, an ideally thin girl was waiting for him to take three or four puffs before throwing her away, he put out his cigarette on the kidneys of the little girl whose skin was quivering and a burn stained the whiteness of the charming body which the cynical German tortured with an indifferent air. Imagine a character with a military rank and imagine the excesses to which his inveterate smoking mania could lead him ...". This provocative text by Apollinaire is not without reminding us that a few years earlier he had prefaced and edited at the Bibliothèque des Curieux, a work devoted to the Marquis de Sade.
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