It is the fate of some writers to gather such a legend about
their lives and personalities that it turns attention away from
what they have actually done and obscures their real worth.
For such a result they themselves are not always responsible.
Obedient to their powerful instincts and blind to the con-
ventions which inhibit ordinary men, they go blithely on their
way, only to find that their superficial eccentricities excite
more interest than their real achievements and that their true
merits are imperfectly understood. Wilhelm Apollinaris de
Kostrovitzki, known to the world as Guillaume Apollinaire,
was such a man. In his lifetime he was almost a legendary
figure, and even now many are more interested in his legend
than in his work. His origins were mysterious. His mother
was a Russian or Polish woman of the demi-monde and was
either unwilling or unable to say who his father was, though
she hinted that he was a prince of the Church, and in later
years Apollinaire's friends accepted the myth and paid tributes
to it by giving him the attributes of a cardinal in their portraits
of him. The higher criticism has raised grave doubts about
this piece of hagiology, but it is characteristic of Apollinaire
that his beginnings were wrapped in mystery. The legend
which began with such auspices received new chapters as he
pursued his independent path through life. There are many
stories about his eccentric dress, his odd behaviour, his practi-
cal jokes, his preposterous whims, his mania for collecting
beautiful or rare objects, his vast bulk, and his heroic and
fabulous greed. It was typical of his destiny that when in 1911
the Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre, he was quite
wrongly accused of stealing it. A Bohemian acquaintance of
his, Guy Pernet, used to steal figurines from museums for
pleasure and gave one to Apollinaire, who kept it on his
mantelpiece; so the police were not wholly unjustified in

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