Guillaume APOLLINAIRE. Simon Mage. Sans lieu ni date [1910].
Autograph manuscript signed "Guillaume Apollinaire", 11 pages on 11 small leaves in-8 mounted on tabs: red jansenist box, spine ribbed, interior framed in red box with mosaic cream box lozenges in the corners, white silk linings and endpapers (Claude Broussard).
Signed autograph manuscript of one of the tales of l'héréSiarque & cie.
The manuscript, which was used for the composition, presents corrections and additions. The published text contains some differences.
In his Complément à l'appareil critique des OEuvres en prose complètes de Guillaume
Apollinaire dans la Pléiade (p. 1477), Michel Décaudin mentions the existence of a second manuscript. The present manuscript, which resurfaced in a Paris sale in 1954 and which
Décaudin was unable to consult, was exhibited at the Barberini Palace in Rome in 1960-1961. It was then the only one known. The first page was reproduced in the Cahiers bleus nº 3, winter 1975-1976).
One of Apollinaire's favourite tales.
"I like Simon mage diffi cile for most people," Apollinaire confessed in a letter to Madeleine Pagès (23 August 1915): "I think this is the first time that the angels have been used in such a precise, scientific and even divine way, and they are playing the real role for which they were imagined.
Michel Décaudin emphasizes how much "this struggle of the true apostle and the impostor, of spirituality and magic, this victory of truth called into question in the last lines, themselves parodies of the death of Christ, as well as details such as the farded mask of the magician, the words that read both ways, etc., compose par excellence the ambiguous and illusory universe, where true and false never cease to interfere."
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