Vanished Smile (14 page)

After their courtroom encounter, the appearance of friendship between Picasso and Apollinaire continued, but its soul was lost, its heart bled dry. Fernande pinpointed the fatal flaw at the core of
la bande de Picasso:

There was hardly anyone in our group who would rush to defend someone who wasn't there. In fact, although they all seemed to be united by strong affection, the minute someone left, the others would start running him down. There can never have been an artistic circle where mockery, spite and deliberately wounding words were more prevalent. There was often a common spirit about art and ideas, but rarely any common affection or generosity, and many of the protestations of admiration or friendship were almost wholly
insincere. The worst offenders were Picasso and Max Jacob, who could never resist an opportunity for a witticism, which could often be malicious—even at the expense of their greatest friends. Max pretty much spared Picasso—there seemed to be no limits either to his admiration or to his deeply affectionate friendship—but he did not feel the same way about the others. Yet in spite of all this, it was an extremely tight-knit little clique that was hard for newcomers to penetrate.

Mona Lisa's theft and Apollinaire's arrest marked the end of a friendship, the end of Fernande and Picasso, the end of Marie and Apollinaire, the end of the rare bonhomie that produced one of the most exuberant, enchanted, creative collaborations in art history. If, as many have said, Apollinaire's greatest talents were for poetry and for friendship, then in the latter, he was badly served. If he thought he had finally found a firm foundation in the poets and artists whose future he championed and shaped, he was disillusioned. His friends divided. While some demanded his release, many others turned away. The closest to him, Picasso and Marie Laurencin, denied him.

A languid gamin with a complexion the color of antique lace, Marie affected an air of naiveté. Apollinaire described her as having “the somber and childlike face of those destined to make men suffer.”
^∗15
Picasso had introduced them, and Marie, who went to art school with Braque, brought him into their gang, but she was an observer, never a full participant. Myopic and neurotic, she peered at people and paintings through a lorgnette and seemed to approach life obliquely, in this world but not of it. Apollinaire was smitten. Marie's feelings seemed more complex.

She remained silent through his ordeal, refusing to visit him in jail or even to write, and she shunned him when he was released.

Some time after, in a version of his poem
Zone
, Apollinaire would write that, like Jesus on the cross, he had lived in Auteuil between two thieves. The good thief was a criminal, and the bad thief was a woman. And because he lived between these two thieves, he was arrested one day for receiving stolen goods.

Apollinaire's sudden notoriety appalled Marie. He had appeared disheveled and handcuffed in newspapers all over the world. The work that he had done to survive, translating and writing erotica, was used to denounce and demean him. The Paris newspapers were highly politicized, and in the conservative press, he was pilloried as a pornographer, sexual predator, reprobate, and rabble-rouser.

Honor was not a grand, empty sentiment to Apollinaire. He had been humiliated publicly, and his loyalty to France questioned. Less than two years later, when war was declared, he enlisted in the French army, joining the Thirty-eighth Artillery. “I so love art that I have joined the artillery,” he joked.

Apollinaire wrote his most beautiful poetry in the army.

In 1916, on the front line in Champagne, he was injured in the head by shrapnel. He never recovered fully from the
physical or the psychological wound. André Billy, a writer and close friend, said:

Apollinaire died on November 9, 1918, two days before the armistice of World War I. He was thirty-eight. Outside his window, jubilant Parisians danced in the street, cheering the end of war and the end of Guillaume. It was a final irony. The Guillaume whose downfall the French were cheering was the German kaiser Wilhelm (Guillaume) II who had abdicated that day.

In an eerie coda to the Apollinaire-Picasso-Géry saga, on the day Apollinaire died, a mutual friend received a note from Géry who claimed to be serving on the Western Front as an officer in the Belgian army. A raven had flown in his open window, and Géry wrote, “I felt I was getting a message from Guillaume Apollinaire. I am very worried about him and beg you to tell me whether he is still alive.”
^∗16

For years, Picasso never spoke of Apollinaire and the Mona Lisa arrest. He continued becoming Picasso, the most extraordinary, the wealthiest, and ironically, the most stolen artist
of the twentieth century. Perhaps he saw the old gang as youthful folly or embarrassing history. He would sue unsuccessfully to prevent Fernande from publishing her memoir, and he would abandon Max Jacob. In their
bateau-lavoir
years, Max had converted to Catholicism after experiencing two apparitions of the Virgin Mary, his second one in the aisle of a movie theater. Picasso was his godfather. But in the end, neither Max's adopted religion nor his illustrious sponsor saved him. When France fell to the Nazis in World War II, he was arrested by the Gestapo and interned in Drancy Although mutual friends pleaded, Picasso failed to petition for his release. Max Jacob—Jew, homosexual, poet, artist, most loyal friend, and yearning spirit—died on March 5, 1944, awaiting deportation to a concentration camp in Germany.

On June 20, 1959, almost fifty years after
L'Affaire des Statuettes
, Picasso made a confession of sorts. He spoke to Gilbert Prouteau, a film director who had made a documentary about Apollinaire.
^∗17

It is a strange confession. In his earlier remarks, Picasso blamed Apollinaire for stealing the Iberian statues from the Louvre exhibit. In this interview, while expressing remorse, in an offhand way he accuses Apollinaire of stealing Mona Lisa. Perhaps Picasso's memory was playing games with him, perhaps he meant to say statue not picture, or perhaps he was still protecting himself.

THE APOLLINAIRE-PICASSO SPECTACLE
was a diversion—intriguing, all-absorbing, but ultimately, a fanciful invention, a case of overzealous police work born of frustration and fervid imagination. Although he grudgingly allowed that the Picasso gang leaders were more
enfants terribles
than clever criminals, Prefect Lépine continued to believe an international ring of thieves was behind Mona Lisa's disappearance. The robbery had been too slick to be the work of a lovesick psychotic, a
common crook, or any gang of amateurs, and beyond the newspaper headlines, there was no concrete evidence pointing to an American millionaire-collector.

The new director of the Louvre acted quickly to fill the security chasm. He hired more guards, brought in attack dogs, and established new rules. Effective immediately, visiting hours were curtailed to allow for closer supervision. Written permission was required before a work of art could be touched. Several exits were sealed permanently, and the other doors were closely monitored.

Leonardos of one kind or another were making news. In the ongoing arms race in Europe, Italy launched its third dreadnought, the
Leonardo da Vinci
, and one of the best three-year-old thoroughbreds in Europe was named Leonardo. But there was no Mona Lisa. At the traditional Mardi Gras parade in Paris, a huge float showed her taking off in an airplane from the roof of the Louvre.

As the investigation stumbled on, Mona Lisa became the phantom of the Louvre. Her presence had bewitched. Now her absence haunted. When Apollinaire was released from jail, Mona Lisa had been missing for twenty-three days, and each day the public waited to learn if the woman with the shady past had come to a tragic end. Wrapped in the mystery of her baffling disappearance was the enigma of Mona Lisa herself.