Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [98]
Two days later, on September 9, Le Matin reported the sensational news:
It was not without emotion and surprise that Paris learned last night of the arrest made by the Sûreté in connection with the recent restitution of Phoenician statuettes stolen from the Louvre in 1907.
The mere name of the person arrested is enough to account for this reaction. He is M. Guillaume Kostrowky [sic], known in literature and art as Guillaume Apollinaire…
What exactly are the charges against him? Both the Public Prosecutor and the police are making a considerable mystery of the affair. 55
Mystery or no, the police intimated that it was far more than a case of a few missing statuettes. According to Le Matin’s editors, they were told, “We are on the trail of a gang of international thieves who came to France for the purpose of despoiling our museums. M. Guillaume Apollinaire committed the error of giving shelter to one of these criminals. Was he aware of what he was doing? That is what we are to determine. In any case, we feel sure that we shall shortly be in possession of all the secrets of the international gang.” 56
Apollinaire had been held in jail for twenty-four hours even before the police announced his arrest. Later, he wrote an account of his imprisonment: “As soon as the heavy door of the Santé 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.” 57
Under further questioning, Apollinaire admitted that the person who had stolen the statuettes was Pieret, only confirming what the police already knew. The investigators wanted the name of the person Pieret sold the statuettes to, but Apollinaire would not reveal that. Back to the Santé he went, and surveyed his bleak cell with the eye of a literary man: “As reading matter they gave me a French translation of The Quadroon, by Captain Mayne Reid, whose adventure novels I remember reading as a schoolboy. During my confinement I read The Quadroon twice, and despite certain shocking improbabilities I found it a book not to be dismissed contemptuously.” 58
Géry Pieret, safely out of Paris, sent a wry note to the Paris-Journal, lamenting Apollinaire’s imprisonment and calling him “kindly, honest, and scrupulous.” Pieret signed himself “Baron Ignace d’Ormesan,” a reference to the main character in Apollinaire’s novel, who has the power to appear in many places at the same time. Artists and writers signed petitions to protest Apollinaire’s arrest, but the police still wanted to know who was the third man in the case. Finally, Apollinaire gave up Picasso’s name. “I did not describe his actual part in the affair, I merely said that he had been taken advantage of, and that he had never known that the antiquities he bought came from the Louvre.” 59
Early the next day, September 12, Fernande answered the doorbell at Picasso’s apartment to find a detective there. Trembling, Picasso dressed hastily. “I had to help him,” wrote Fernande, “as he was almost out of his mind with fear.” Picasso was taken to the office of the investigating magistrate and “saw Apollinaire — pale, dishevelled and unshaven, with his collar torn, his shirt unbuttoned, no tie, and looking gaunt and insubstantial: a lamentable scarecrow.” 60
There are differing accounts of what happened next. Fernande, writing long