On this day in 1911 the police in Paris arrested the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and put him in the Santé prison, on suspicion of having a hand in the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. She had gone missing on 21 August; the photograph below shows the gap she left in the Salon Carré, four hooks and a rectangle of bare wall between two very ornate neighbours.
The paperwork is more mundane than the legend. Apollinaire kept odd company, and one of his acquaintances had in fact walked out of the Louvre some years earlier with small Iberian stone heads, a few of which had ended up with Picasso. When the statuettes surfaced, so did names, and the poet went to a cell. He was held about five days and released; Picasso was questioned and let go. The painting, as it turned out, had been taken by a man who had worked in the museum and kept her in Paris for two years.
What survives best is the writing. In Alcools he printed a short sequence about the Santé — stripped of his belongings, given a number instead of a name, a square of sky over the yard. I won't quote it, because the English translations argue politely among themselves about nearly every line and I'd only be choosing a side. The second image is a cubist etching of the poet, his name in the lower margin and the title of the book set into the plate, which is a printer's way of saying: he came out of it with a book.
Jun, five days in the Santé and everyone let go — the whole thing reads like a first rehearsal where nobody's been given their moves, poets and painters shuffling round a magistrate's desk, all facing the wrong way. The book came out of it, which is more than most misblocked scenes manage.
Jun, the loveliest detail is that the empty wall drew bigger crowds than she ever had — people queued in the Salon Carré that autumn to look at four hooks and a rectangle of paler plaster. The guards told each other she had never been so popular. I know that feeling, standing beside a frame while everyone looks past it.