EXPANDED NOTES keyed to the biography, Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters, W. W. Norton, 2020

1. Madame Jacob borrowed a room in the house of a friend at 18 rue du Parc, above the Café de Bretagne, at the corner of the rue du Parc and the rue Saint François. The Jacob family lived not at 14 rue du Parc as Pierre Andreu thought (mistaking the census figure of number of inhabitants for the address) but at number 8, above their principal shop, La Belle Jardinière. According to Antonio Rodriguez, the editor of the Gallimard Quarto edition of Max Jacob’s Oeuvres, there remains some confusion about the address in which Jacob was born: either in his family’s home, 8 rue du Parc, or at the friend’s apartment, 14 rue du Parc (O, 29). But in a letter to me, Hélène Henry, a specialist in Jacob’s Breton background, explained Madame Jacob’s choice to give birth at the neighbor’s house and affirmed that a number of elderly residents of Quimper had corroborated the claim.

2. MJ, “Un acteur en tournée,” CI, in O, 814.

3. TB, in O, 1257.

4. MJ, “Récit de ma conversion,” in O, 1474. Jacob composed this account of his conversion late in life, in 1939, at the request of a priest. It was published posthumously in André Blanchet’s edition of DT in 1964 and again in 1951 in La Vie intellectuelle. O, 1793.

5. Hélène Henry, “Max Jacob et Quimper,” Cahiers de l’Iroise 3, no. 35 (July–September 1962): 133. The unwelcoming ecclesiastic owned “la maison Rossi” at 24 rue du Parc, where the Jacob family’s subsidiary store, Au Bon Marché, occupied the ground floor. The canon was a choleric and influential man and a complicated figure. When peasants, enraged by the state closure of church schools, attacked the Jacobs’ main store, La Belle Jardinière, in 1903, the canon stood in the street defying a hail of stones to protect the store from being sacked. In SM, Jacob presents the canon as “a terrifying Italian canon who looked like Mirabeau” and had dealings with demons; at the end of the story the canon is tricked into freeing two imprisoned angels, and the author, somewhat maliciously, prays for his soul: “As for the canon, Matorel, sanctified, prays for him. My God! Deliver him from the infernal cauldrons! Let Christ’s blood ransom his! And you! Saint John, think of the wretched canon. Amos the Prophet! Don’t forget him! Deliver the canon! He is more to be pitied than blamed. I beg that he, too, become a saint. So be it!” SM, in O, 247.

6. MJ, “Récit,” in O, 1475.

7. Pierre Andreu, Vie et mort de Max Jacob (Paris: Table Ronde, 1982), 15.

8. Robert Guiette, La Vie de Max Jacob (Paris: Nizet, 1976), 31. Jacob is mistaken. Aunt Julie was not the mother, but the grandmother, of Jean-Richard Bloch, who was the son of her son Richard Bloch.

9. Ibid., 33. Julie Bloch was the daughter, not the sister, of Samuel Alexandre.

10. Michael Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 31.

11. Simon Schwarzfuchs, Les Juifs de France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1975), 213.

12. Andreu, Vie et mort, 21.

13. BF, 211. The character is Madame Gagelin.

14. Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth (New York: New American Library, 1977), 206. Gobineau’s book, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, which influenced Hitler, was published in Paris in 1855. Max Jacob would later refer to Gobineau in the same parenthesis with Shakespeare, Spinoza, and Rimbaud as a thinker of “profundity of vision” (BF, 33), describing him in 1917 to his patron Jacques Doucet as “the greatest and most misunderstood French prose writer of the nineteenth century.” See François Chapon, Mystère et splendeurs de Jacques Doucet (Paris: J. Clattes, 1984), 237. Jacob probably based his enthusiasm on Gobineau’s novels Les Pléiades and Les Nouvelles asiatiques, whose aristocratic fantasies and precious style were also admired by Apollinaire, Cocteau, and Proust. Gobineau’s reputation in France reached such proportions that in February 1934 the Nouvelle revue française devoted the entire issue to “Gobineau et le gobinisme,” with laudatory contributions by Robert Dreyfus and Daniel Halévy, among others, and a blandly racist essay by Clément Serpeille de Gobineau, a descendant of the philosopher-novelist.

15. Poliakov, Aryan Myth, 83. When Max Jacob later parodied these Himalayan fantasies in the preface to his collection of pseudo-Breton poems, La Côte, he was also taking aim at his cousin by marriage, Sylvain Lévi, who held the chair of Sanskrit at the Collège de France.

16. Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, 17th ed. (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1893), 125. Renan was not too fanatical to change his mind. Drumont, who had drawn on Renan’s Histoire générale des langues sémitiques to bolster his theory of Aryan supremacy, reviled the elder Renan who by 1883 no longer believed in a Jewish “race.” See Édouard Drumont, La France juive (Paris: C. Marpon & Flammarion, 1887), 1:14.

17. F. M Luzel, Gwerziou (1868–1890; reprinted Paris: G. P. Maisonneuve & Larose, 1971), 2:31–36.

18. For these reminiscences, see René Plantier, Max Jacob et Quimper, collectif avec des articles d’Hélène Henry, Alain Le Grand-Vélin, Jean Caveng et des documents (Quimper: Calligrammes, 1984), especially the article “Les Souvenirs d’Abel Villard” by Louis Ogès. The article contains some muddled information that can be straightened out by consulting Andreu’s work. The direct recorded testimony by Villard is useful.

19. Guiette, Vie, 34.

20. Ibid., 33.

21. Louis Ogès, “Les Souvenirs d’Abel Villard,” in Plantier, Max Jacob et Quimper, 27.

22. Andreu, Vie et mort, 20.

23. Ibid. 

24. Ibid. 

25. TB, in O, 1145.

26. Ogès, “Les Souvenirs,” 30.

27. MJ, Lettres à René Villard, ed. Yannick Pelletier (Mortemart: Rougerie, 1978), 11.

28. René Villard, “Max Jacob à Quimper, Histoire d’une classe de lycée,” Correspondant, January 10, 1930, 79.

29. MJ, Lettres à Villard, 12.

30. Ibid., 13.

31. Ibid., 79.

32. Ibid., 114.

33. Ibid., 104.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., 78.

36. For an account of the drowning, see Pierre Allier, “Max Jacob Quimpérois,” in Plantier, Max Jacob et Quimper, 20.

37. MJ, “Présentation de l’auteur par lui-même,” Gouaches et dessins, Max Jacob, catalogue Exposition Max Jacob, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, March 8–20, 1920, n.p.

38. Guiette, Vie, 39.

39. Ibid., 22.

40. Ibid., 35.

41. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 49.

42. Georges Guillain, Jean-Martin Charcot, sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Masson et Cie, 1955), 31.

43. Poliakov, Aryan Myth, 284.

44. Gay, Freud, 50.

45. Guillain, Charcot, 35.

46. Ibid., 137.

47. MJ to Julien Lanoë, May 8, 1942, in Lettres à Julien Lanoë, 1925–1944. Avec poèmes et textes inédits de Max Jacob, ed. Anne Kimball (Geneva: Droz, 2019), 471.

48. DT, in O, 460. 

49. Guiette, Vie, 35.

50. Ibid., 37.

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1. Strindberg described this hallucinatory period of his life in his memoir The Inferno; an account may also be found in Michael Meyer’s Strindberg (New York: Random House, 1985).

2. CTH, 14.

3. HCHR, 26.

4. Ibid.

5. Kenneth Cornell documents the diatribes against Symbolist and Decadent writers in publications such as Le Figaro, Le Gaulois, Le XIXème siècle, and La France. Kenneth Cornell, The Symbolist Movement (1951; reprinted New York: Archon, 1970), 42, 57, 74.

6. Stéphane Mallarmé, “La Musique et les lettres,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and J. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 643.

7. Mallarmé’s article “Déplacement avantageux,” with its nuanced irony attending the notion of poetic “advantage,” was published partly as “Le Fonds littéraire” in Le Figaro, August 17, 1894, and partly in La Revue blanche, under its proper title, in October 1894. It appeared a year later in book form as the introduction to La Musique et les lettres (Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1895).

8. MJ to Jean-Jacques Mezure, a young correspondent he never met, June 1, 1942. MJ, Lettres à un jeune homme 1941–1944, ed. Patricia Sustrac (Paris: Bartillat, 2009), 89.

9. Maurice Maeterlinck, Serres chaudes (1889; reprinted Brussels: P. Lacomblez, 1895), 8.

10. Jules Romains, Souvenirs et confidences d’un écrivain (Paris: Fayard, 1958), 17.

11. CD, Preface, in O, 349.

12. Andreu, Vie et mort, 23. 

13. François Caron, France des patriotes (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 453.

14. Bernard Lazare, L’Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes, cited in Denis Bredin, The Affair, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Braziller, 1986), 570.

15. Hippolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine: La Révolution, le gouvernement révolutionnaire, le régime moderne (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1986), 753. First published in multiple volumes between 1876 and 1894. 

16. William Chambers Morrow, Bohemian Paris of Today (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1900), 34ff.

17. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1968). The first chapter, a splendid portrait of the Belle Époque, takes exhibitionism as a major theme.

18. Patricia Leighton, Reordering the Universe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 50.

19. Jean Maitron, Le Mouvement anarchiste en France (Paris: François Maspero, 1975), 206.

20. Ibid., 207.

21. Ibid., 235.

22. Ibid.

23. André Salmon, Souvenirs sans fin (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 1:167.

24. Guiette, Vie, 39.

25. Andreu, Vie et mort, 29.

26. MJ, “Poème,” CD, in O, 46.

27. Hélène Henry communicated these details to me in a letter, n.d., and quoted René Villard’s romantic hypothesis.

28. MJ, Lettres à Villard, 15.

29. Ibid., 78. See also O, 36.

30. Guiette, Vie, 40.

31. MJ, “Surpris et charmé,” RB, in O, 857. “Surprised and Delighted,” in Hesitant Fire: Selected Prose of Max Jacob, trans. and ed. Moishe Black and Maria Green (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1991), 82.

32. Ibid.

33. MJ, Lettres à Michel Levanti, ed. Lawrence Joseph (Mortemart: Rougerie, 1975), 68.

34. The pond turns up in an early poem, “Plainte du mauvais garçon” (The Bad Boy’s Lament), written around 1900, and in the poem “Le Départ.” LC, in O, 564, 561.

35. In 1939, the banker Robert Zunz commissioned two albums from Jacob, one a collection of religious poems and drawings, and one devoted to Brittany. The Breton album (in the collection of Gérard Zunz) is a piecemeal autobiography, gathering some of Jacob’s finest gouaches and pen and ink drawings, drafts of poems, scraps of memoir, photographs, and documents. In one passage he says he experienced his first “esthetic emotion” in the hilltop village of Locronan and still considers it one of the most beautiful places in the world. Breton album, unpublished. 

36. C, 23.

37. MJ, “La Croix d’or,” RB, in O, 847. 

38. Jacques de Cambry, Voyage dans le Finistère, ed. Roger Dupuy (Brest: J.-B. Lefournier, 1836), 98.

39. Albert le Grand, La Vie des saints, quoted in Hersart de la Villemarqué, Barzaz-Breiz (1867; reprinted Paris: Perrin, 1959), xxi.

40. MJ, “La Fille de fontaine,” PMG, in O, 1617.

41. The doctor in the story, Marius Alexandre, is infuriated to discover that the narrator’s playful detective work has revealed, at least to the narrator, the identities of the doctor’s secret lady friends. A similar incident in real life destroyed the friendship between Max Jacob and his old lycée companion, Dr. Alexandre Morvan. See Hélène Henry, “Dans l’ombre de Max Jacob: le Quimpérois Pierre Allier,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 1 (1978): 43; Hélène Henry, “Max Jacob aux archives de Finistère,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 10 (1988): 45.

42. Andreu, Vie et mort, 34.

43. Guiette, Vie, 40.

44. Andreu, Vie et mort, 31.

45. MJ to Kahnweiler, c. 1910, in MJ, Correspondance, ed. François Garnier (Paris: Éditions de Paris, 1953), 1:52–55.

46. MJ to Moïse Kisling, January 28, 1924, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:22, 23. An even more exalted scene had taken place in the cathedral roughly a decade earlier. On Christmas night, 1886, the eighteen-year-old skeptic Paul Claudel had been struck by the conversion which altered the course of his life: “In an instant my heart was touched and I believed.” Paul Claudel, Oeuvres en prose, ed. Jacques Petit and Charles Galpérine (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 1010.

47. Guiette, Vie, 41. Madec had been a fellow student at the lycée in Quimper and is remembered affectionately among the dead in Jacob’s prepared remarks in 1936 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the school’s founding. MJ, Lettres à Villard, 64.

48. Guiette, Vie, 41.

49. Ibid., 43.

50. Pierre Birnbaum, The Anti-Semitic Moment, trans. Jane Marie Todd (1998; reprinted New York: Hill & Wang, 2003), 257.

51. Ibid., 270.

52. Guiette, Vie, 43. 

53. Marie-Joseph Louy, Léon Bloy et son époque, 1870–1914 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1944), 49.

54. MJ, “1889,” DT, in O, 459. Loïe Fuller, the American dancer, has been misplaced in time by Max Jacob’s memory. Her great successes in Paris came with her dancing at the Folies Bergère in 1892 and with her own theater at the Universal Exposition of 1900. La Belle Otéro (Carolina Otéro, 1868–1965) was a star dancer at the Folies Bergère and one of the most successful courtesans of the period.

55. MJ, “1900,” DT, in O, 462.

56. One café Biard near the Place Pigalle in Montmartre was famous as a place for gay nightlife and rendezvous. Another, near the Opéra on the Boulevard des Italiens, would be celebrated for its louche atmosphere by Louis Aragon in his 1926 novel Le Paysan de Paris.

57. Jacob was not alone in reading Dreyfus as a Jewish scapegoat for Christian sin. Already in 1892, before the Dreyfus Affair, Léon Bloy had argued for the centrality of Judaism to Christianity (Le Salut par les Juifs), and in 1900, in Je m’accuse, Bloy wrote, “What concerns us is to know what, in fact, that convict is expiating over there. . . . ” God wanted his condemnation, claimed Bloy, and “if God weren’t infallible, who could be?” Cited by Pierre Vidal-Naquet in “Jacques Maritain et les Juifs: Réflexions sur un parcours,” in Jacques Maritain, L’impossible antisémitisme (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1994), 24.

58. CA, 10.

59. Guiette, Vie, 44, 45.

60. CA, 32.

61. Ibid., 21.

62. Ibid., 23. Many of Simon’s colorful, vigorous Breton scenes can be seen at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Quimper.

63. Ibid., 45.

64. Ibid., 56.

65. Ibid., 52, 107, 124.

66. Ibid., 53, 124.

67. Guiette, Vie, 45.

68. As Andreu emphasizes, Max Jacob repeatedly inscribed the significant age of twenty-three in his mature writing. Andreu, Vie et mort, 44.

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1. It is not possible to date precisely Jacob’s tenancy at the Quai aux Fleurs. In his letter to Kisling in January 1924, Jacob speaks of having been twenty years old at the time he lived at Quai aux Fleurs, which would situate the period earlier, in 1896. Henri Dion, who tried to establish a chronology of Jacob’s lodgings, threw up his hands at Quai aux Fleurs and wrote that it was “to be situated before 1903 or after October 1907.” Henri Dion, “Les logis de Max Jacob,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 5 (1983): 71. I find the memoir of Jean Valmy-Baysse most convincing, as he describes the room precisely and locates the scenes of his visits during Jacob’s attempts to paint, after having quit his job as an art critic. Jean Valmy-Baysse, “Souvenirs sur Max Jacob,” Aguedal 4, no. 2 (May 1939): 169–72. Valmy-Baysse dates the residency at Quai aux Fleurs to 1900 and 1901, up through Jacob’s discovery of Picasso’s work in June 1901—the name of the Spanish painter recurred frequently in Jacob’s conversation, Valmy-Baysse recalls. Furthermore, in his lecture at Nantes in 1937, Jacob mentions living at Quai aux Fleurs at the time of his meeting with Picasso. Hélène Seckel, Max Jacob et Picasso (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994), 1.

2. Valmy-Baysse, “Souvenirs,” 170.

3. MJ, “Présentation de l’auteur par lui-même,” n.p.

4. André Peyre, Max Jacob quotidien (Paris: José Millas-Martin, 1976), 49; Andreu, Vie et mort, 208. “Make his mother happy”: Neal Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux de Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 243.

5. MJ, “Présentation de l’auteur par lui-même,” n.p.

6. The manuscript of Le Christ à Montparnasse is in ms. 7198-2 at the BLJD. Jacob included the Doucet poems in his OBM of 1912, DT of 1919, and LC of 1921. François Garnier, editor of the first edition of Jacob’s correspondence, assigns “En famille” vaguely to 1900 (Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:13) and “J’ai perdu le ciel” roughly to the same period (Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:21). Max Jacob, in the biography he practically dictated to Robert Guiette, describes his early struggles to turn “his excellent natural language into written French” and places them in the first period of his friendship with Picasso—which would be 1901—before another stint of odd jobs and his employment as secretary to a lawyer for an exhibit at Le Petit Palais later in 1901. The chronology in Guiette’s brief chapter is vague but covers the period 1900–1904 and emphasizes Jacob’s early poetic attempts. See Guiette, Vie, 50.

7. Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:21. 

8. “Mille regrets” has a complicated history. The earliest version seems to be the one sent in August 1912 to Emma and Henri Hertz, recorded by Hélène Henry in Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 1 (1978): 41, and published in La Phalange in 1913, under the title “Mille autres regrets” (incipit “Jadis quand j’approchais . . .”). The Doucet manuscript contains an interim version rich in suggestive revisions. The final version appears in LC, in O, 564.

9. MJ, “En famille,” Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:13. A slightly revised version was published in Les Soirées de Paris (November 15, 1913): 26, and in LC, in O, 623. 

10. Delphine resented Max’s impecunious manner of life. When he stayed with his family in Quimper, she even haggled with him over sugar for his morning coffee, so that he took to slipping into his pocket sugar cubes left over on his friends’ saucers at the Café de l’Epée. See the memoir by the painter Giovanni Léonardi, “Le poète Max Jacob, souvenirs quimpérois,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 8 (1986): 29. In the version of the poem published by Apollinaire in Les Soirées de Paris, another line, later deleted, insists on the authoritarian presence of the sister, who even seems to share the position at the head of the table with the mother. The lines run: “En haut de la table où ils étaient quatre, / La soeur écrivait sur un papier clair, / La mère en rêvant regardait ses bagues.” (The extra line in English runs, “The sister was writing on a bright sheet of paper.”) 

11. MJ, “Plainte du mauvais garçon,” was published, along with “En famille,” in Les Soirées de Paris (November 15, 1913) and in LC, in O, 564. In the manuscript and in Les Soirées de Paris, the poem is punctuated conventionally; it is not until 1921, in LC, that Jacob accentuated the poem’s fluidity by removing all the periods and commas, leaving only four exclamation points that serve more as indications for performance than as syntactic markers.

12. Hélène Seckel quotes from Paul Léautaud’s journal, June 20, 1931, an unusually frank passage about Fernande Olivier’s account of Jacob’s sexual practices: “She spoke of Max Jacob’s homosexuality, of the disgust she had for his consorting with heavily mustachioed policemen and Republican Guards, idem. She asked him one day, ‘But after all, don’t you ever get rebuffed? Couldn’t that cause you trouble?’ Max Jacob assures her that it never happens, that there are many partners in the two units.” Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 35n24.

13. MJ to Moïse Kisling, January 28, 1924, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:22–23.

14. The café closed in 1897 but had established a new genre of cabaret.

15. Le Sourire, no. 2 (April 14, 1900).

16. Jacques Chastenet, La République triomphante (Paris: Hachette, 1955), 187.

17. Henri Dion, “Les logis de Max Jacob,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 5 (1983): 71.

18. Guiette, Vie, 51.

19. Marcel Béalu, Dernier visage de Max Jacob (Paris: E. Vitte, 1959), 54. Hélène Henry devoted years of research to the quimpérois background of both the play and the novel TB. See the following articles: Hélène Henry, “Bouchaballe ‘un’ ou La comédie retrouvée,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 5 (1983): 5–12; Hélène Henry, “Max Jacob aux archives du Finistère,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 10 (1988): 33–48; Hélène Henry, “Surprises d’une topographie jacobienne,” “La Donation Couchouren,” and “Documents photographiques et cartes postales pour voir Le Terrain Bouchaballe,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 3 (1980): 13–70; Hélène Henry and Max Jacob, “La Première ‘Nouvelle de Guichin’ en 1910,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 7 (1985): 18–29.

20. Guiette, Vie, 51.

21. Ibid., 52.

22. Ibid.

23. Berthe Weill, Pan! Dans l’œil!: Orné des aquarelles et dessins de Raoul Dufy,

Pascin et Picasso (Paris: Librairie Lipschutz, 1933), 55.

24. The militant order of the Assumptionist Fathers, who published the anti-Semitic and anti-Republican newspaper La Croix, had already been dissolved. The law of July 1 required that remaining religious orders apply for legal authorization from the state or risk dissolution and forbade unauthorized orders to teach. Not until the ministry of Émile Combes in 1902 did the Republican anticlerical program go into high gear, banning eighty-one women’s orders and fifty-four men’s orders. In July 1904, all members of religious orders were forbidden to teach, secular officials took control of burials, and religious property was sold below its market value. All these measures fueled reactionary movements, such as Action Française, and led to the legal separation of church and state in 1904 and conflicts that gathered force again in the 1930s and prepared for Vichy. A typically lighthearted version of turn-of-the century anticlericalism appears in Max Jacob’s poem “1900”: “Suppression des fêtes de noces: / Plus de curé, plus de carrosses, / Voire plus de maire!” (No more celebrating marriages: / No more priests, no more carriages. / In fact, no more mayor!) DT, in O, 461. For a brisk account of the anticlerical laws, see Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1965), 3:58–66.

25. Guiette, Vie, 40; Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso: 1895–1906 (New York: E. Weyhe, 1932), 1:xxiv. 

26. MJ, “Histoire de la cloche qui ne va pas à Rome,” ms. 3, Fonds Max Jacob, Médiathèque des Ursulines, Quimper.

27. The most sinister character was the Abbé Boullan, portrayed by Huysmans as “le Docteur Johannès” in Là-Bas. Boullan was rumored to have sacrificed a baby; he was imprisoned in Rome from 1860 to 1864 and excommunicated by the archbishop of Paris in 1875. See Hubert Juin, preface to Un Coeur en peine, by Joséphin Péladan (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1984), 22.

28. Rosanna Warren, “A Metaphysic of Painting: The Notes of André Derain,” Georgia Review 32, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 123, 138.

29. See Edmond Fleg’s preface to the edition of The Zohar that Max Jacob studied, translated by Jean de Pauly (Paris: Éditions du Chant Nouveau, 1946). Pauly’s translation is unreliable as a guide to The Zohar, but it’s the text that Jacob knew.

30. Pierre Abraham, Les Trois frères (Paris: Éditeurs Français Réunis, 1971), 45, 46.

31. In the sadness of hindsight, one notes that no branch of the family, practicing or nonpracticing, converted or unconverted, was spared the Nazi horror. Pierre Abraham’s mother was interned at the camp at Drancy where Max Jacob died, and she died at Auschwitz. Max’s cousin Noémie Gompel, Pierre Abraham’s aunt, committed suicide in Biarritz in 1940 upon learning of the German capture of Paris. Max Jacob, all his siblings, and his brother-in-law died directly or indirectly at the hands of the Nazis, except Maurice, who died in 1930, and Jacques, the tailor, who survived the war in Paris.

32. Abraham, Trois frères, 45, 46.

33. Typical treatment of the Kabbalah appears in the Anthologie de l’occultisme edited by Blaise Cendrars for Grillot de Givry in 1922. There, a few pages from The Zohar are jumbled in among fragments of Orphic hymns, Egyptian esoteric texts, and excerpts from Paracelsus and Swedenborg, to name just a few. Grillot de Givry, Anthologie de l’occultisme (Paris: Éditions de La Sirène, 1922).

34. MJ to Levanti, n.d., in MJ, Lettres à Levanti, 60.

35. “Thus it is written (Psalm cxix, 18): ‘Remove the veil that covers my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.’” Zohar, trans. Pauly, 1:145b. Jean de Pauly translates from the Hebrew, emphasizing the image of the veil. In the Vulgate, the verse runs, “Revela oculos meos / Et considerabo mirabilia de lege tua,” which is translated quite literally in the King James version as “Open thou mine eyes” and in the standard French Bible of Crampon, revised by Joseph Bonsirven, as “Ouvre mes yeux.” La Sainte Bible, trans. Le Chanonine Crampon (Tournais, Belgium: Desclée et Cie, 1960), 699.

36. Zohar, trans. Pauly, 3:152a.

37. MJ, “Chrétiens et païens,” DT, in O, 514; the prose journal entry in DT, in O, 485; and the article “Pensées” in Philosophies (March 15, 1924): 157–60.

38. MJ to Levanti, October 27, 1938, in MJ, Lettres à Levanti, 72.

39. Yvon Belaval, La Rencontre avec Max Jacob (Paris: Librairie Philosophique Vrin, 1974), 45.

40. John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 3 vols. (New York: Random House, 1991–2010), 1:148.

41. Picasso’s Notebooks (catalog) (New York: Jan Krugier, 1995).

42. Weill, Pan!, 65–67.

43. Jacob made this statement in the lecture at Nantes in 1937. The text is reproduced in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 1.

44. Weill, Pan!, 76.

45. Richardson, Life, 1:198, 199.

46. MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso contés par Max Jacob,” Cahiers d’art 2, no. 6 (1927): 199–202. October 25 is the date accepted by Picasso’s biographers, and there seems no reason to question it. See Pierre Daix, Picasso Créateur: La Vie intime et l’oeuvre (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 15; Richardson, Life, 1:25.

47. MJ and Claude Valence, Miroir d’astrologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 139ff.

48. The relevant memoirs are Max Jacob, “The Early Days of Pablo Picasso,” Vanity Fair, May 1923, 62–63, 104; “Souvenirs sur Picasso”; “Naissance du cubisme et autres,” Nouvelles littéraires, April 30, 1932, 1, 2; and “Le tiers transporté: Chronique des temps héroïques,” Les Feux de Paris, no. 7–8 (January 12, 1937). The posthumously published memoirs are Chronique des temps héroïques (Paris: Louis Broder, 1956) and “L’Inédit de Max Jacob sur Picasso: Fox,” Lettres françaises, no. 1051 (October 22–28, 1964): 1, 11, reprinted in La Nouvelle Critique, no. 64 (May 1973, 47–49), and in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 29, 30.

49. Jacob is misremembering dates. The year was 1901, and Picasso was nineteen.

50. MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso,” 199–202.

51. MJ, “The Early Days of Pablo Picasso,” 62.

52. MJ, Lecture at Nantes, in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 243.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid., 243–44.

55. Simon Mondzain, “Max Jacob et Montparnasse,” Arche 1, no. 4 (1944): 107–14.

56. MJ, Lecture at Nantes, in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 244.

57. Ibid.

58. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 3, 4.

59. In the same paragraph in the lecture at Nantes in which Picasso is said to have declared, “You are the only French poet of the age,” Jacob briefly describes the origins and arc of his poetic career, collapsing his first meeting with Picasso in 1901 with events from the second phase of their friendship that began sixteen months later when they shared Jacob’s room in Boulevard Voltaire: “I had to earn my living, now that I was a great poet. I was an employee on Boulevard Voltaire, and I lived in a hotel room across from my store.” Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 244.

60. MJ, “Je suis né à Quimper . . . ,” in René Édouard-Joseph, Dictionnaire biographique des artistes contemporains 1910–1930 (Paris: Art et Édition, 1931), 2:212.

61. MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso,” 200.

62. Seckel expresses surprise that Jacob should not have known of the large blue mother and child painted over his own portrait. But if one remembers that Jacob spent the end—and certainly December—of 1901 with his family in Quimper, it is understandable that he wouldn’t have followed the career of his portrait in a period when Picasso painted over many canvases and was about to leave for Spain.

63. MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso,” 199.

64. MJ, “L’Inédit,” 1, 11.

65. Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: Portraits et souvenirs (Paris: Louis Carré, Maximilien Vox, 1946), 81. 

66. Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso (Paris: Cahiers d’art, 1932), 1:xxix.

67. Richardson, Life, 1:201.

68. Abraham, Trois frères, 45.

69. Ibid.

70. MJ to Charles-Louis Philippe, December 12, 1901, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:21.

71. Marcel Béalu, “Propos, souvenirs, et anecdotes de Max Jacob,” Boîte à clous, no. 10 (February 1951): n.p.

72. Ibid.

73. MJ, “L’Enterrement.” The full text can be consulted in Andreu, Vie et mort, 304–5. As Alexander Dickow points out in Le Poète innombrable, the drafts in the Bibliothèque Nationale show that Jacob worked on the poem carefully.

74. Andreu, Vie et mort, 43.

75. MJ, “Je suis né,” 212.

76. Hubert Fabureau, Max Jacob, son oeuvre (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1935), 16.

77. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 9. 

78. Ibid.; Richardson, Life, 1:218, 219.

79. Weill, Pan!, 76.

80. Richardson, Life, 1:248.

81. Ibid., 1:254.

82. Weill, Pan!, 85.

83. “Sisket” may have been the nickname of the sculptor Auguste Aguero. Richardson, Life, 1:254; Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 11.

84. Richardson, Life, 1:258.

85. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 20.

86. MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso,” 200.

87. Andreu, Vie et mort, 37.

88. Seckel reproduces a letter from Picasso to the proprietor of the Hôtel du Maroc, dated January 1903, promising to pay his debt; the return address is “Chez M. Max Jacob, 150 bd. Voltaire.” Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 17.

89. MJ, “Entrepot Voltaire,” RB, in O, 862.

90. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 20.

91. MJ, Lecture at Nantes, in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 244.

92. Louis Aragon, Anicet ou le Panorama (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1921), 66. Picasso later protested that he had never entertained the notion of suicide. See Richardson, Life, 1:262.

93. MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso,” 200.

94. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 25n12.

95. CTH, 91.

96. Richardson, Life, 1:266.

97. Fernande Olivier, Picasso et ses amis (Paris: Stock, 1933), 20.

98. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 12, 13. The drawings of the hands are so expert they seem to have been done by Picasso; the drawing of the left hand has a fine little sketch of Max Jacob’s face on the lower left side. The explanations of the fortune are clearly written by Jacob.

99. Ibid., 15.

100. MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso,” 200.

101. Richardson, Life, 1:266.

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1. Guiette, Vie, 59.

2. For “Cécile,” see Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 26n26. Fernande also calls Max Jacob’s lover “Cécile” (Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 34). But Picasso referred to her as “Geneviève”; see the drawing reproduced in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 24; Richardson, Life, 1:261. For “Germaine,” see Guiette, Vie, 54ff. For Jacob’s two drawings of Cécile, see Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 24.

3. M, 113.

4. MJ, “À la Chaudière!,” LC, in O, 601.

5. Ms. n. acq. fr. 15951, BnF.

6. MJ, “Fantaisie sur le baiser inattendu,” OBM, in O, 290.

7. Guiette, Vie, 59; Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 24. Jacob’s inscription on the drawing.

8. Andreu, Vie et mort, 38.

9. Guiette, Vie, 54.

10. Ibid., 55.

11. SM, in O, 327.

12. Richardson, Life, 1:21.

13. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 23.

14. Richardson, Life, 1:260.

15. André Salmon, Max Jacob, poète, peintre, mystique et homme de qualité (Paris: René Girard, 1927), 25. Seckel notes that it is impossible to pinpoint the date of Picasso’s return to Barcelona. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 25n5.

16. SM, in O, 195.

17. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 5.

18. MJ, “Réponse à une question . . . ,” Minotaure, no. 3–4 (1933): 110.

19. Records at the Paris-France store indicate that Jacob was on the payroll from February 5 to November 23, 1903. The figure “eight months” mentioned to Guiette probably indicates that Jacob took some weeks off during the summer. He reimagined the experience in later fictions, principally in SM (1911) and in a story and two theatrical scenes in RB (1921). 

20. SM, in O, 192.

21. Ibid., 194.

22. MJ, “Entrepot Voltaire,” RB, in O, 874.

23. Jacob gives an elaborate description of this friend, who was also a graphologist, in CTH, 67, and thanks him for his schooling in the art of interpreting handwriting.

24. Guiette, Vie, 59.

25. Jacob had moved to 33 boulevard Barbès at some point in the late winter or early spring of 1903. Seckel reproduces Picasso’s address book from 1903 to 1907 with Jacob’s address on boulevard Barbès. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 23.

26. Guiette, Vie, 60.

27. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 23.

28. Guiette, Vie, 60.

29. Ibid., 60, 61. The prose poem he has in mind is the untitled “La pauvre Bérénice,” OBM, in O, 314.

30. MJ, “Historique de ce livre (si on peut dire)” (1943), Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 1 (1951): 11.

31. Garnier misdates to 1903 Jacob’s letter to Apollinaire about an engagement (Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:27). In the spring of 1913, Jacob wrote Jean-Richard Bloch of his intention to marry (MJ, “36 Lettres de Max Jacob à Jean-Richard Bloch, 1re partie,” ed. Michel Trebitsch, Europe 62, no. 662–63 [June–July 1984]: 146). A month or two later Jacob wrote Kahnweiler from Céret, where he was staying with Picasso, that his marriage was broken off (Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 98). It is usually assumed that this was the liaison with an Indochinese woman he confessed to Roger Toulouse, years later, reported in André Peyre, Max Jacob quotidien (Paris: Millas-Martin, 1976), 90. In August 1909, he wrote to Apollinaire about having a mistress who danced in a theater in Champigny, but this sounds like a bluff. See André Billy, “Max Jacob à Guillaume Apollinaire,” Livres de France, no. 7 (December 1957): 4.

32. MJ, “Le mariage du poète,” OBM, in O, 292.

33. SM, in O, 237.

34. Guiette, Vie, 61.

35. Ibid., 62.

36. Georges Gabory, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Gide, Malraux & Cie (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1988), 30.

37. MJ, Le Christ à Montparnasse, ms. 7198-2, BLJD.

38. MJ, “Historique de ce livre,” 11.

39. Guiette, Vie, 64.

40. HRK, in O, 115.

41. Guiette, Vie, 65; MJ, “Historique de ce livre,” 11.

42. Guiette, Vie, 67.

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1. It is not the case, as Jacob claimed to Guiette, that the publishing house had closed. See Alexander Dickow’s article, “Le Géant du soleil, un conte retrouvé de Max Jacob,” Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 15–16 (2015): 31–35. The story was published in four installments in Les Lectures de la semaine—pour la famille in March 1904 and is reprinted in Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 15–16 (2015): 37–59. Dickow examines the inaccuracies in Jacob’s account to Guiette, including the claim that he transformed the rejected Géant into the novel Le Phanérogame, published in 1918. There’s no overlap in the stories, but Dickow argues that Gaston Bonnier, the botanist from the Académie des Sciences who was associated with the Librairie générale and had commissioned and then refused Jacob’s book, becomes a kind of model for the pompous academics who populate Le Phanérogame. And Bonnier was the author of a scientific work entitled Phanérogames. 

2. In a letter to Jouhandeau, February 25, 1924, Jacob wrote, “The profound failure of Bouchaballe came from publishing in 1921 a work that had been conceived in 1903.” MJ, Lettres à Marcel Jouhandeau, ed. Anne Kimball (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1979), 91.

3. Hélène Henry, “Le Théâtre des hostilités,” unpublished manuscript.

4. Hélène Henry, “Bouchaballe ‘un’ ou La comédie retrouvée,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 5 (1983): 9.

5. Ibid., 33.

6. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 27. This letter remains a puzzle, as Picasso didn’t publish drawings in Parisian journals in 1904. In 1901, he had drawings printed in Le Frou-Frou, and Jacob often tried to place his friend’s work in these years. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 34n3.

7. Ibid., 27.

8. MJ, “La Prime de la Sarahmitaine,” Sourire, no. 113 (January 30, 1904).

9. MJ, “Invitation au voyage,” LC, in O, 614.

10. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 22, 23.

11. Ibid., 27.

12. MJ, Lecture at Nantes, ibid., 244.

13. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 24. As Richardson points out, there are inconsistencies in Olivier’s accounts of her life before she took up with Picasso. The sculptor may have been called Gaston de la Baume, and Fernande herself went by various names: she was the illegitimate daughter of Clara Lang and an unknown father, and her legal name was Amélie Lang. She was brought up by her father’s half-sister, a Madame Bellevallé, and sometimes used that surname. Her first husband, a brute her family forced her to marry when she was eighteen, was called Paul-Émile Percheron, so for years her other legal name was Amélie Percheron, though she had run away from him after one miserable year. See Richardson, Life, 1:310, 311.

14. André Salmon, Manuscrit trouvé dans un chapeau (Paris: Société Littéraire de France, 1919), 86.

15. Ibid., 32. Richardson reproduces the drawings; Richardson, Life, 1:296.

16. Salmon, Manuscrit, 87.

17. MJ, “L’Inédit,” 1, 11. Reprinted in Nouvelle critique, no. 64 (May 1973): 47–49, and in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 29, 30.

18. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 49.

19. Salmon, Souvenirs, 1:171.

20. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 29, 34n17.

21. Ibid., 30.

22. Ibid., 29, 30.

23. Ibid., 31.

24. Salmon, Souvenirs, 1:119.

25. Roland Dorgelès, Bouquet de Bohème (Paris: Albin Michel, 1947), 63.

26. CTH, 38.

27. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 26.

28. MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso,” 202.

29. Richardson, Life, 1:351.

30. MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso,” 202.

31. Guiette, Vie, 69.

32. Maurice Martin du Gard, Les Mémorables (Paris: Flammarion, 1957), 105.

33. The question of Cubist poetics has been much debated, and the hottest debates go back to 1917. Pierre Reverdy attacked the concept, rehearsing (without naming) what is essentially Lessing’s argument in The Laocoön that different media have different relations to space and time and cannot represent one another. Pierre Reverdy, “Notes et extraits,” Nord-Sud, no. 13 (March 1918). Max Jacob, on the other hand, saw his poetry in plastic and pictorial terms. Paul Dermée, in his lecture on Jacob in December 1916, compared his poems to Cubist paintings, and in 1927 Jacob stated the case to his mother: “Cubism in painting is the art of composing that painting in its own terms regardless of what it represents, and to give primary importance to geometric construction, invoking real life only through allusion. Literary Cubism does the same thing in literature, using reality only as a means and not as an end. Example: my Cornet à dés, and Reverdy’s work.” Ms. 12, Fonds Max Jacob, Médiathèque des Ursulines, Quimper. Michel Décaudin and Etienne-Alain Hubert give an excellent account of the history of the phrase “Literary Cubism” and its attendant controversies in “Petit historique d’une appellation: ‘Cubisme littéraire,’” Europe, no. 638–39 (June–July 1982): 7–25.

34. MJ, “Écrit en 1904,” LC, in O, 582. I have given only the first and last passages of this long poem. Abd-el-Kader (1818–1883) was a heroic Algerian military leader who held off the French colonial forces for years. 

35. Louis Émié, Dialogues avec Max Jacob (Paris: Corréa, 1954), 38.

36. Tatiana Greene, “Notice, en préambule aux lettres de Max Jacob à Marguerite Mespoulet,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 4 (1981–82): 40.

37. MJ, “Comme Marie-Madeleine,” LC, in O, 632. Other revisions of “Fortifs” provide important glimpses into Jacob’s process of composition. Une âme illuminée (an illuminated soul) becomes désolée (desolated, grieving); the bathetic pantelant (panting) becomes soucieuse (anxious for, devoted to). In the final quatrain, the nautical image is preserved but complicated in the move from coeur bien amarré (heart well moored) to éperonné (spurred, or rammed, by a ship). The sarcastic bec Auer de religiosités (arc light of religiosities) is tempered to luminaire de l’idéalité (“shining with ideality,” which I have translated “ideally starred”). The revisions show what careful management of tone went into the making of these superficially disordered poems.

38. Ms. n. acq. fr. 15951, Fonds Max Jacob, BnF.

39. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 32.

40. Richardson, Life, 1:302–7.

41. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 25.

42. Ibid., 26.

43. Fernande Olivier, Souvenirs intimes: Écrits pour Picasso (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1988), 185. 

44. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 33.

45. MJ, “La Bohème pendant la guerre de 1914,” RB, in O, 849.

46. Different memoirists have insisted on dates ranging from 1903 to 1905, and scholars have made strong cases for both October 1904 and February 1905, with the evidence coming down to the blurred date on a postcard sent by Jacob to Salmon and to two different shows including works by Picasso, one in October 1904 at Berthe Weill’s gallery and one at the Galerie Serrurier in February 1905.

47. Guiette, Vie, 71. Accounts of the meeting of Picasso and Apollinaire, and the subsequent meetings of Jacob and Apollinaire and Jacob and Salmon, form a specialized bibliography. The crucial memoirs are Salmon, Souvenirs, 1:164–68; Jean Mollet, Les Mémoires du Baron Mollet (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 55; MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso,” 199–202; MJ, “Le tiers transporté”; MJ, Lecture at Nantes, in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 244; and Guiette, Vie, 71. Salmon misremembers the year as 1903, an impossibility as Picasso was not yet at the Bateau Lavoir. Jacob in 1937 mentions 1904, a date Richardson also argues for (Richardson, Life, 1:327). Seckel has exhaustively examined the evidence, down to enlisting the aid of a postal specialist in the Musée de la Poste to decipher a blurred delivery date on the postcard Jacob sent to Salmon just after their meeting. On the basis of that card (February 1905, day illegible), and on the further evidence of Apollinaire’s pocket calendar for 1905 containing the addresses of Picasso and Jacob—at 13 rue Ravignan and 33 boulevard Barbès—(whereas his calendar for 1904 shows no recognition of their existence) Seckel situates the meetings in February 1905, just before the opening of Picasso’s show at the Galerie Serrurier, February 25. She is not doctrinaire about the matter, observing that it is one “which we do not claim to settle.” She assembles the data for this puzzle on page 37 and in the footnotes—which read like detective fiction—on page 44 of Max Jacob et Picasso. Didier Gompel-Netter and Annie Marcoux reproduce the crucial postcard in Les Propos et les jours (Paris: Zodiaque, 1989), 26. There is also controversy about which English bar on the Rue d’Amsterdam set the scene for Picasso’s encounter with Apollinaire. Apollinaire frequented both Austin’s Fox (variously spelled) and the Criterion, and both have been claimed.

48. Pierre-Marcel Adéma made the case for an Italian army officer, Francesco Flugi d’Aspermont, as Apollinaire’s father in Guillaume Apollinaire, le mal-aimé (Paris: Plon, 1952). Francis Steegmuller tends to agree with him but presents as well the proposal by Anatol Stern that the mysterious father might be the son of Angelica’s distant elder cousin Melanie Kostrowitzky and Napoléon II, Napoléon’s son, the young man known as l’Aiglon. See Francis Steegmuller, Apollinaire: Poet Among Painters (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1963), 11–19.

49. Mollet, Mémoires, 36.

50. Ibid., 37.

51. Ibid., 37, 38.

52. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 36, 244; Mollet, Mémoires, 55. Austin’s went by many names. Officially it was Austen’s Railway Restaurant, Hotel and Bar, 26 rue d’Amsterdam, and it served primarily English jockeys and trainers who drank there on their way to and from the racetrack at the Maisons Lafitte. As Francis Steegmuller discovered, the bar was also called Austen (or Austin) Fox’s Bar, Austin’s Fox Bar, L’Austin’s Fox, or Le Fox. Steegmuller, Apollinaire, 133. It became one of Apollinaire’s favorite lairs, and he would meet his painter friends there, a fact Braque commemorated in his still life etching from 1911, Fox. 

53. Brassaï, Conversations with Picasso, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 229.

54. MJ, Lecture at Nantes, in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 244. Translation in Steegmuller, Apollinaire, 134.

55. Guiette, Vie, 72.

56. MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso,” 202.

57. In this chapter in Guiette, Vie, Salmon enters only as an adjunct to the funeral: “In 1918, 13 November, the day after the death of Apollinaire, Max Jacob, André Salmon, and Picasso walked in his funeral cortege. ‘Guillaume Apollinaire, the greatest poet of this epoch, and of several others.’” Guiette, Vie, 73.

58. MJ to Tristan Tzara, February 26, 1916, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:116.

59. Verges puns on verge, “rod,” “wand,” or “penis,” and vierge, “virgin.” It also puns on the legend of Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgin martyrs who were supposed to have died with her.

60. Richardson, Life, 1:305.

61. Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, Correspondance, ed. Pierre Caizergues and Hélène Seckel (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 47.

62. MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso,” 202.

63. “Spectacle” became “Crepuscule”; “Les Saltimbanques” retained its title but lost its last two stanzas. See Picasso and Apollinaire, Correspondance, 35, 36.

64. Steegmuller, Apollinaire, 153.

65. Guillaume Apollinaire, Le Poète assassiné, ed. Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 62.

66. Eight days, at least, by Salmon’s reckoning. See Salmon, Souvenirs, 1:166.

67. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 37.

68. Guiette, Vie, 74.

69. Ibid., 75.

70. Salmon, Souvenirs, 1:164.

71. Ibid., 1:171.

72. This is the postcard that has added to the controversy about the dates of the encounters. Richardson reads the blurred date as October and thinks it refers to the group show including Picasso’s work at Berthe Weill’s gallery in October 1904. Seckel deciphers the date as February 1905 and believes the show to be the one at the Galerie Serrurier. Richardson, Life, 1:327; Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 37.

73. Salmon, Souvenirs, 1:174.

74. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 41, 42.

75. Guiette, Vie, 76.

76. MJ, “Jeunesse,” Nouvelles littéraires, April 22, 1933, 1.

77. Salmon, Souvenirs, 2:96. 

78. Ibid., 97.

79. Salmon, Manuscrit, 84.

80. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 61.

81. Richardson reproduces a marvelous photograph of the décor of the Lapin Agile. Richardson, Life, 1:373.

82. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 68, 69.

83. Andreu, Vie et mort, 52.

84. Guiette, Vie, 77.

85. CTH, 55.

86. MJ, “Montmartre,” Le Figaro artistique illustré, June 1931, 20.

87. Salmon, Souvenirs, 1:186.

88. MJ, “Jeunesse,” 1; Salmon, Souvenirs, 1:186.

89. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 38. Various versions of this scene survive; Jacob remembers them shouting “Down with Laforgue! Vive Rimbaud!” (MJ, “Jeunesse,” 1). Salmon remembers the imprecation as “Down with Rimbaud!” (Salmon, Souvenirs, 1:187). Doubtless, they attacked different poets on different nights, according to the mood.

90. Richardson, Life, 1:362.

91. Ibid.

92. CTH, 48, 49.

93. Richardson, Life, 1:367.

94. MJ and Jean Cocteau, Correspondance 1917–1944, ed. Anne Kimball (Paris: Paris-Méditerranée, 2000), 401. A résumé of the different versions can be found in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 38.

95. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 63.

96. Ibid., 44, 45.

97. Adéma, Apollinaire, le mal-aimé, 80.

98. MJ, “Le Cheval,” Lettres modernes, no. 2 (May 1905): 16. The other poems are “Nombril dans le brouillard,” “Bielles,” “La Gale,” and “Calvitie de la Butte Montmartre.”

99. Salmon, Souvenirs, 1:181. See Alexander Dickow’s article on Jacob’s complex refashioning of Mallarmé: “Max Jacob et le Symbolisme,” Europe 92, no. 1019 (March 2014): 104–15.

100. MJ, “Grand récitatif pour salons,” OBM, in O, 265.

101. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 45n32.

102. MJ, “Variation d’une formule,” OBM, in O, 268.

103. Ibid., 270.

104. MJ, “La Leçon de musique,” OBM, in O, 271.

105. Ibid.

106. See Dickow, “Max Jacob et le Symbolisme,” for an extended discussion of Jacob’s debt to Mallarmé, and in particular his adoption of the key Mallarmean word “litige.” I argue that Jacob’s relation to his Symbolist elder was somewhat more “litigious” than Dickow thinks. 

107. The composition of Rimbaud’s Illuminations presents one of the most controversial problems in nineteenth-century French literary history. For a full account, see André Guyaux’s edition of Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 939ff. Most of the prose poems of Illuminations were published in La Vogue in numbers 5, 6, 8, and 9, in May and June 1886; more were added in the 1895 Vanier edition of Poésies complètes. Prominent Symbolist poets (Gustave Kahn, Jules Laforgue, and Jean Moréas) and, later, Jacques Roubaud and others have seen Rimbaud’s two poems in vers libres from the manuscript, “Marine” and “Mouvement,” as the first French free verse. Guyaux disagrees, insisting that vers libre can only be conceived as emerging from metrical verse (Rimbaud, Oeuvres completes, 969). When Rimbaud was composing the Illuminations between 1872 and 1874, he had already loosened up metrical verse in the mystical poems written in 1872 included in “L’Alchimie du verbe” in Une saison en enfer. It seems to me that the experience of composing prose poems could have combined with his testing the boundaries of verse and that “Marine” and “Mouvement” can legitimately be seen as emerging from these two hybrid but distinct projects: vers libéré and the prose poem. Suzanne Bernard, in Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1959), establishes the full historical and editorial context in which the prose poem and vers libre emerged in the 1880s, as controversial then, perhaps, as now.

108. Paul Claudel, “Ma conversion,” in Oeuvres en prose, ed. Jacques Petit and Charles Galpérine (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 1008–14.

109. Bernard, Le Poème en prose, 490.

110. MJ to Norbert Guterman, November 24, 1924, in Box 1, Ms. 0528, in Guterman, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Jacob’s defensiveness about Rimbaud later fueled his quarrels with Pierre Reverdy and the Surrealists. His art is fundamentally different, but it owes more to his predecessor than he liked to think.

111. Andreu, Vie et mort, 48. 

112. Guiette, Vie, 144.

113. MJ, “Poème simultané avec superposition simple,” CD, in O, 357. In the 1922 edition, it is entitled “Idylle.” In the 1923 edition, and in O, the title is “Poème.” The Greek is wrong: ειδυλλος should be εἰδύλλιον, derived from εἰδος, that which is seen, form, shape, figure, from the verb εἰδω, to see.

114. Picasso and Apollinaire, Correspondence, 31.

115. Ibid., 32.

116. Richardson, Life, 1:348, 349.

117. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 40.

118. Ibid., 37.

119. Ibid. 

120. MJ to Maurice Raynal, July 19, 1905, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:29.

121. MJ, “Le Chevalier de la Barre,” OBM, in O, 262.

122. Olivier, Souvenirs intimes, 192.

123. Richardson, Life, 1:346, 382–87.

124. John Richardson disagrees with Rebecca Rabinow, author of the essay “Discovering Modern Art: The Steins’ early Years in Paris 1903–1907” in Janet Bishop, Cécile Debray, and Rebecca Rabinow, The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011), about when Leo purchased the first two works by Picasso. Richardson (Life, 1:397) thinks it occurred in October 1905, shortly after the purchase of Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. Rabinow thinks it happened in March 1905 after the Picasso exhibit at Serrurier et Cie (The Steins Collect, 28, 436). It hardly matters; it’s clear that Leo bought the Steins’ first Matisse and first Picassos in 1905, and that Gertrude was at first less than enthusiastic.

125. Richardson, Life, 1:398, 399.

126. Fernande’s maiden name, from her adoptive mother, was Bellevallé. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 42.

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1. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 46.

2. Ibid. 

3. Picasso and Apollinaire, Correspondance, 45. Burton’s Beer, according to an advertisement in La Revue immoraliste, could be bought in Paris only at Austin’s Fox.

4. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 47.

5. Ibid., 49.

6. Richardson, Life, 1:428–53.

7. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 48. The riot of puns here includes the double sense of déménager: most commonly it means “to move house,” but in slang it also means “to go out of one’s mind.” The poem “Avenue du Maine” appeared in OBM, in O, 269, and has often been reprinted. André Billy included it in his selection for “Poètes d’aujourd’hui,” the popular Seghers series. André Billy, Max Jacob (Paris: Seghers, 1945), 100, 101.

8. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 48.

9. Salmon, Souvenirs, 1:354.

10. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 49.

11. Catherine Coquio, “Max Jacob et Mécislas Golberg, Polichinelles et Charlots,” in Max Jacob poète et romancier, ed. Christine Van Rogger Andreucci (Pau: Publications de l’Université de Pau, 1995), 228.

12. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 35n24.

13. Guillaume Apollinaire, Journal intime, ed. Michel Décaudin (Paris: Éditions du Limon, 1991), 142, 145.

14. Oliver, Picasso et ses amis, 125.

15. Guiette, Vie, 61.

16. Apollinaire, Journal intime, 142.

17. Richardson, Life, 1:352.

18. Mollet, Mémoires, 57; Richardson, Life, 1:352.

19. Apollinaire, Journal intime, 142.

20. Adéma, Apollinaire, le mal-aimé, 83.

21. Guillaume Apollinaire, Anecdotiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 43, 290. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 59. Daireaux’s seconds were the Baron François de Montrémy and le Comte de Failly. Mitty so amused Apollinaire that the poet devoted a whole article to his fantasies, Napoleonic fixation, and eccentricities in his column in the Mercure de France in 1911.

22. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 135.

23. MJ to Levesque, January 29, 1927, in Une Amitié de Max Jacob: Lettres de Max Jacob à Robert Levesque, ed. Pierre Masson (Mortemart: Rougerie, 1994), 16–19.

24. André Salmon, La Jeune peinture française (Paris: Albert Messein, 1912), 41–44.

25. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 207.

26. MJ to Levesque, January 29, 1927, in MJ, Lettres à Levesque, 16–19. In other accounts, Jacob remembered Salmon being present at the dinner with Matisse. Salmon himself couldn’t remember, years later, whether he’d been there or not. Jacob’s various memoirs of the Demoiselles have been collected by Hélène Seckel. The main texts are MJ, “The Early Days of Pablo Picasso”; MJ’s 1927 letter to Levesque; MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso”; MJ, “L’Inédit”; MJ, “Naissance”; MJ, “Jeunesse”; and MJ, Lecture at Nantes, in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 246.

27. Richardson, Life, 1:474.

28. Ibid., 1:429.

29. Richardson, Life, 2:17.

30. For another account of the genesis of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, see Pierre Cabanne, Le Siècle de Picasso, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 1:283–302.

31. Richardson, Life, 2:23.

32. Picasso’s denial of the African influence has created an ongoing debate. The positions are summarized in Richardson, Life, 1:451, and Richardson, Life, 2:24–27. Not only at Matisse’s house but in the dusty displays at the Musée d’Ethnographie in the Palais du Trocadéro, Picasso absorbed what he thought of as magic from the African and Oceanic carvings. They offered not just a new vocabulary of form he could use in his quest for simplification; he found in them, he told Malraux, a notion of art as intercession, weapons of the spirit (Richardson, Life, 2:24). As Richardson argues, Picasso must have visited the Trocadéro in March, around the time he received the Iberian heads from Pieret, and he returned often to commune with those spirits who were releasing him from European canons of beauty. Nor did he always go alone; Françoise Gilot tells us that he went at first with Derain (Richardson, Life, 2:25) and later the whole bande—Jacob, Apollinaire, and Salmon—was initiated. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 63nn10–11. Salmon, Souvenirs, 3:253. See also Jack Flam, Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2003), 32–34.

33. MJ, “L’Inédit,” 1, 11.

34. André Salmon, Propos d’atelier (Paris: Crès, 1922), 16; Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 59. Salmon also wrote about Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in La Jeune peinture française, where once again he mentions its original joking title, Le Bordel d’Avignon. Salmon, La Jeune peinture française, 41–44. As usual, he didn’t notice much about the painting.

35. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 59.

36. Andreu, Vie et mort, 17.

37. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 59; William Rubin, “La Genèse des Demoiselles d’Avignon,” in Hélène Seckel, ed., Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, catalogue for exhibition at the Musée Picasso, January 26–April 18, 1988 (Paris: Ministère de la culture et de la communication: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1988), 364–487.

38. MJ, “Naissance,” 7.

39. Richardson, Life, 1:396.

40. Richardson, Life, 2:45. Flam, Matisse and Picasso, 37–48. And see Yve-Alain Bois’s discussion of Matisse’s pictorial responses to Les Demoiselles in Matisse and Picasso, the catalogue for the exhibition Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Tex., January 31–May 2, 1999 (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 29–30.

41. Originally published at Jacob’s expense in 1918, Le Phanérogame was reprinted in 1996 by Éditions Bartavelle in Charlieu.

42. P, 9. The name Tropgrandglaïeul conflates the three final words in Mallarmé’s poem “Prose, pour des Esseintes,” in yet another sign of Jacob’s complex relation with this Symbolist forebear. Jacob’s ladder would remain, not surprisingly, one of Max Jacob’s major symbols, as he elaborated his private versions of the great biblical vision of a ladder connecting human and divine realms. In Le Siège de Jérusalem, the 1914 play continuing Matorel’s adventures, the Wild Boar demands, “Answer! What does Jacob’s Ladder mean?” To which Matorel replies, “The ladder is made of squares, the square is man’s spirit. You can’t get to the top if you haven’t been on the bottom. The angels climbing up and down works on Jacob’s spirit while he sleeps as Penelope worked on the shroud of Ulysses [sic], that spiritual Greek” (SM, 109; not reprinted in O). In 1918, Max Jacob wrote Jean Paulhan: “I insist that the image should have climbed the ladder, Jacob’s Ladder whose squares are the rungs of the spirit.” Max Jacob and Jean Paulhan, Correspondance, ed. Anne Kimball (Paris: Éditions Paris-Méditerranée, 2005), 62. 

43. Remy de Gourmont, La Physique de l’amour: Essai sur l’instinct sexuel (Paris: Mercure de France, 1903).

44. P, 20.

45. Alexander Dickow has pointed out that the professor of botany Gaston Bonnier, who accepted Jacob’s story “Le Géant du soleil” for serial publication in 1904, was the author of a scientific book entitled Phanérogames. Dickow, “Le Géant du soleil.”

46. P, 43.

47. P, 181.

48. P, 190.

49. MJ, “Métempsychose.” Catherine Coquio, “Max Jacob et Mécislas Golberg,” in Max Jacob, poète et romancier, ed. Alain Faudemay (Pau: Université de Pau, 1995), 227–28. For comparison, see CD, in O, 408. Bluebeard would become a recurrent image for Jacob.

50. Coquio, “Jacob et Golberg,” 228.

51. Émié, Dialogues, 197–98.

52. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 56–57.

53. Dorgelès, Bouquet, 300–301.

54. Guillaume Apollinaire, Petites merveilles du quotidien, ed. Pierre Caizergues (Montpellier: Bibliothèque artistique et littéraire, 1979), 22.

55. His cousin Pierre Abraham remembered Jacob’s clothes “reeking” with ether, several years earlier. Abraham, Trois frères, 54.

56. Francis Carco, Bohème d’artiste (Paris: Albin Michel, 1940), 277.

57. Olivier, Souvenirs intimes, 242–43.

58. Salmon, Souvenirs, 1:188.

59. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 104.

60. Ibid., 106.

61. Richardson, Life, 2:60–63.

62. Guillaume Apollinaire, Les peintres cubistes, Méditations esthétiques, ed. L.-C. Breunig and J.-Cl. Chevalier (Paris: Hermann, 1980), 93.

63. Marie Laurencin, Le Carnet des nuits (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1956), 40.

64. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 72.

65. Apollinaire, Journal intime, 143.

66. The drawing is reproduced in Flam, Matisse and Picasso, 54.

67. Salmon, Souvenirs, 2:329.

68. Henri Hertz, “Contribution à la figure de Max Jacob,” Europe, no. 489 (January 1970): 137–41. A postcard addressed to “Monsieur Max,” dated June 1919 and bearing the greeting “Souvenirs Raymonde,” turned up in Jacob’s papers after his death and suggests that he and Raymonde had not entirely lost touch with each other. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 64n39.

69. Richardson, Life, 2:47.

70. Ibid., 2:50.

71. Salmon, Souvenirs, 1:378.

72. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 65, 66.

73. Ibid., 66.

74. Dorgelès, Bouquet, 116.

75. Salmon, Souvenirs, 1:160.

76. Jules Romains, La Vie unanime, 2nd ed. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1913), 17.

77. Peyre, Jacob quotidien, 124.

78. Le Dernier Cahier de Mécislas Golberg (Paris, 1908); Mécislas Golberg, “Invocation à Louis Le Cardonnel,” 91; Louis Le Cardonnel, “Jour perdu,” 93; MJ, “Scène d’intérieur,” 193, in LC as “La Dame aveugle” (The Blind Woman) as part of the sequence “Autres personnages du bal masqué,” in O, 625. 

79. Maurice Parturier, Max Jacob: Notes biographiques (Paris: Le Divan, 1954), 6.

80. Apollinaire, Journal intime, 142.

81. MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso,” 202.

82. CTH, 62.

83. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 65.

84. Vittorio Rieti, interview with author.

85. Jean Cocteau, Le Passé défini (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 1:62.

86. Guillaume Apollinaire, “La Phalange nouvelle,” in Oeuvres en prose complètes, ed. Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 2:894.

87. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 191; Francis Carco, De Montmartre au Quartier Latin (Paris: Albin Michel, 1927), 32.

88. Andreu, Vie et mort, 54.

89. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Les Trois vertus plastiques,” in Chroniques d'art 1902–1918, ed. L. C. Breunig (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 71–72. Apollinaire, “Le Brasier,” in Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Pierre-Marcel Adéma and Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 108.

90. Richardson, Life, 2:87.

91. Dorgelès, Bouquet, 48.

92. Ibid., 48, 49; Salmon, Souvenirs, 2:23.

93. Jules Romains and Guillaume Apollinaire, Correspondance, ed. Claude Martin (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1994), 131–35. Salmon, Souvenirs, 1:376.

94. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 69.

95. André Salmon, André Salmon on French Modern Art, trans. Beth S. Gersh-Nešic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 166n17. Vauxcelles wrote of “cubes” in his review of Braque’s exhibition of landscapes at Kahnweiler’s gallery in 1908, but Charles Morice was the first to write “cubism” in his review of the Salon des Indépendants of 1909 in the Mercure de France.

96. Adéma, Apollinaire, le mal-aimé, 102.

97. Salmon, Souvenirs, 2:24.

98. Ibid., 2:247–48.

99. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 78.

100. Salmon, Souvenirs, 2:49.

101. MJ, Lettres à René Rimbert, ed. Christine Van Rogger Andreucci and Maria Green (Mortemart: Rougerie, 1983), 58.

102. Ibid., 107n70.

103. Salmon, Souvenirs, 2:58.

104. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 81.

105. Geneviève Laporte, Un amour secret de Picasso. Si tard le soir . . . (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1989), 54.

106. Richardson, Life, 2:110.

107. Salmon, Souvenirs, 2:58.

108. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 70.

109. Ibid.

110. MJ to Apollinaire, June 23, 1909, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:34–36.

111. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 230.

112. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Poème lu au mariage d’André Salmon,” in Oeuvres poétiques, 83.

113. MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso,” 202.

114. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 163.

115. Ibid., 167.

116. MJ to Cocteau, November 22, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 455. 

117. Guiette, Vie, 86.

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1. The color red is traditionally associated with the planet Mars and its god, and thus they appear in the mythological mishmash of SM, in O, 229. In the red cloth behind Jacob’s apparition, the color signified the zodiacal Heaven of Mars, Jacob explained in his article “La Clef des songes” in 1925: “The spirit or angel was not from the Heaven of Mars, but this color had a part to play in the whole symbolic structure: red suited the time in which the apparition occurred: it expressed that the moral revolution brought by the apparition was due to the epoch then being born of the rule of the Heaven of Mars (which brought us the Great War and the revolutionary state of mind of the modern world).” MJ, “La Clef des songes,” Philosophies, no. 5–6 (March 1925): 582. Jacob had long associated Mars with modernity; see his letters to his cousin Jean-Richard Bloch from June and July 1911: “In 1909 there was a revolution in the cosmos! The planet Mars came near the earth. Now Mars acts upon the moon and the moon is all artists worthy of the name.” MJ, “Lettres à Bloch, 1re partie,” 131–33. Jacob was still musing about Mars in the 1930s as he composed CTH. He saw Mars as disorder and the moon as creative order, the first, Futurist, the second, Cubist, and both “surreal.” Eerily, he predicted the end of World War II: “In 1945, Mars, having finished his task of butchery, will lose.” CTH, 20. Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux, 294.

2. DT, in O, 471. MJ, “Récit,” in O, 1476.

3. MJ, “Récit de ma conversion,” dictated in 1939 to Paul Frizot, at the request of the Abbé Louis Foucher and printed in La Vie intellectuelle, March 1951, 54–66. Reprinted, with slight modifications, in Réalités secrètes, October 1951. Further reprinted, with attempts to restore the earlier version and, somewhat weirdly, “to reproduce the account of [Jacob’s] conversion just as he himself would have written it if he hadn’t dictated it,” by Jacob’s younger cousin and a major collector of Jacobiana, Didier Gompel-Netter in La Vie spirituelle (May–June 1980): 393–403. A text originally dictated for private doctrinal purposes and never meant for publication reaches us in a somewhat fluid state. Gompel-Netter takes unusual liberties, however, in inserting paragraph divisions and removing adjectives on the sole basis of his subjective hunches about what Jacob might have done. The standard version of the text, based on the 1951 publication, appears in DT, 287, and in O, 1473.

4. André Guyon, “Un copain de Romains,” in Max Jacob à la confluence: Actes du colloque de Quimper (Quimper: Bibliothèque Municipale, 2000), 85. 

5. MJ, “Différents états d’esprit, ou portrait de l’auteur au travail,” in ms. 7198 (4) 1, BLJD.

6. “Enquête,” Minotaure, no. 3–4 (1933).

7. DT, in O, 494, 505, 507.

8. MJ, “Récit,” in O, 1471. MJ, Méditations, ed. René Plantier (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 117. See also the meditation dated September 1941, printed by André Blanchet in La Littérature et le spirituel (Paris: Aubier, 1959), 35; and another dated 1944 in Andreu, Vie et mort, 56.

9. MJ to Maurice Raynal, November 30, 1914, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:105.

10. MJ, “Le Christ au cinématographe,” DT, in O, 488.

11. MJ, “Lettres à Jean-Richard Bloch, 2e partie,” ed. Michel Trebitsch, Europe 62, no. 666 (October 1984): 145.

12. Andreu confesses himself frankly mystified. Noting that Henri Dion had turned up evidence of the workmen having installed the skylight in Jacob’s room on December 2 and 3, 1909—an event Jacob also mythologized as preparing for Christ’s apparition—Andreu scratches his head and asks, “How could Max have been so persistently mistaken?” (Andreu, Vie et mort, 56). Seckel, too, notes the discrepancies in dates without trying to explain them (Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 73n13). Didier Gompel-Netter simply opts for September 22 (because it is one date repeated several times in DT) and then treats it as fact in his commentary on his presentation of a “restored” text of “Récit de ma conversion” in La Vie spirituelle (402). Richardson, with even less evidence, chooses October 7: “After taking Jacob’s illness and poetic license into consideration, I would settle for early October—partly because it was the time of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, which the poet had been brought up to observe” (Richardson, Life, 2:147). This reasoning flies in the face of the facts. Jacob was always clear about his family’s secular orientation and about the lack of Jewish religious observance in the household: “After the deaths of my grandparents, there was no longer any question of God or any religious observance” (“Récit,” in O, 1474). Jacob was lamentably ignorant about the Jewish calendar; in a letter dated September 29, 1914, he had to ask his cousin Jean-Richard Bloch to tell him the date of Rosh Hashanah (MJ, “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 143).

13. Blanchet’s chapter on Jacob in La Littérature et le spirituel (Paris: Aubier, 1959) is the same text as the two articles he wrote under the pseudonym of André Vendôme entitled “La Conversion de Max Jacob,” published in Études, January–February 1948, 16–91 and 166–93, respectively. 

14. SM, in O, 218.

15. Ibid., 233.

16. Ibid. This scene, contracted, became the prose poem “Visitation” in DT, in O, 472. Jacob appears to be as idiosyncratic in his use of Kabbalah as in his interpretations of Christian symbols. The Hebrew letter Tet, T, corresponds to the number nine. Matorel asserts that the number eight represents pure equilibrium, intelligence, and humanity, and that God is one (SM, in O, 233–36). Therefore the cross equals humanity plus God, 8 + 1. Elsewhere Jacob claimed that the number eight represented “spirit,” and the number one, God (Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 4 (1981–82): 15). He is free with his interpretations, promiscuously mixing Greek and Roman mythology with Kabbalah; in a letter to Jean-Richard Bloch written shortly after SM, he claimed that “beauty is in the number nine; this is the number of the moon, the moon is Diana and Diana is chastity” (MJ, “Lettres à Bloch, 1re partie,” 132).

17. DT, in O, 472. Henri Dion, “Les Logis de Max Jacob,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 5 (1983): 71. Dion’s discovery of the account book of the contractor for those jobs in Jacob’s room at the Bateau Lavoir, 7 rue Ravignan, complicates the story of the dates of his apparition; the work was done on December 2 and 3, 1909. 

18. MJ, “La Clef des songes.” 

19. Guyon, “Un copain,” 85. 

20. MJ, “Différents états d’esprit.” 

21. MJ, “La Clef des songes,” 573–83.

22. André Salmon, Max Jacob, poète, peintre, mystique et homme de qualité (Paris: René Girard, 1927), 17.

23. MJ, “Doute,” OBM, in O, 328.

24. MJ, “Poèmes mystiques,” Mesures, October 15, 1935, 50.

25. MJ, “Récit,” in O, 1477.

26. MJ, “À un prêtre qui me refuse le baptême,” DT, in O, 479.

27. MJ, “Récit,” in O, 1477.

28. MJ, “Significations,” DT, in O, 474. The argument runs throughout SM. In chapter 5, when Matorel has become Brother Manassé, the prior of the Lazarist Monastery of Saint Teresa of Avila in Barcelona, he is accosted by his old worldly friend Émile Cordier, now converted. Cordier represents one side of Jacob’s inner debate: “Look at this delicately sculpted little ivory Christ! That’s how we must adore the divine body: we must adore it by explaining it.” To which Matorel replies: “I used to think as you do, Émile, and I’ve had revelations on this subject, but I believe our salvation is in prayer.” SM, in O, 241.

29. MJ, “Récit,” in O, 1477. Saint François de Sales’s devotional masterpiece from the seventeenth century, Introduction à la vie dévote, presents a picture of Christian life adapted to worldly, everyday circumstances; it is aimed at people living in “the world,” not at religious extremists, ecstatics, or would-be saints. It was popular in this period of intensified Catholic life and conversions in France. See Frédéric Gugelot, La Conversion des intellectuels au catholicisme en France 1885–1935 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1998), 75. Jacob remained fond of Saint François de Sales’s book all his life. 

30. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 181.

31. Guiette, Vie, 87.

32. MJ, “Mes fleurs dans mes mains” and “Le Golfe de la plage,” in Jules Romains, “La Génération nouvelle et son unité,” Nouvelle Revue française, no. 7 (August 1909): 30–39. Jacob reprinted “Mes fleurs dans mes mains” as “Véritable poème” in CD, in O, 414. In another of the prose poems of CD, “Une de mes journées,” he satirized his own capacity for paranoia in a fantasy about Romains: “ . . . going to M. Vildrac’s to ask him for a magazine and not taking the magazine because M. Jules Romains speaks ill of me in it. Not having slept because of a regret, because of many regrets and despair.” CD, in O, 408.

33. Jules Romains, “La Poésie immédiate,” Vers et prose, no. 19 (October–December 1909): 90–95. Romains and Apollinaire, Correspondance, 140–49. 

34. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 71.

35. Guiette, Vie, 119.

36. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 73. The screen is not noted in the Kahnweiler archives and cannot be traced. Salmon relates the story of the screen with notable dislike of Kahnweiler: “Because the publisher was, in fact, only a dealer in paintings, he arranged to be given, under the table, the four-panel screen painted entirely by hand. And by what a hand!” Salmon, Jacob, poète, 28.

37. MJ, “La Couronne de Vulcain,” Pan 2, no. 12 (December 1909): 243–55. Reprinted by the Galerie Simon in 1923, one hundred copies illustrated by Suzanne Roger; in Max Jacob et la Bretagne, Cahiers Max Jacob no. 5 (1960): 49–60; and RB, in O, 143.

38. MJ to Tzara, February 26, 1916, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:115.

39. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 84.

40. MJ, Lettres à un jeune homme, 45. 

41. SM, in O, 191.

42. Ibid., 183.

43. Ibid., 210.

44. Ibid., 187.

45. Ibid., 201.

46. Ibid., 227.

47. In 1922, Jacob would declare: “The Cult of the Sacred Heart, the spear-cut or the fifth wound is the cult of the physical mark of the deepest intelligence” (AP, in O, 1349.) Years later, he wrote to his young lover René Dulsou about suffering as education in terms he would repeat time and again in different contexts: “It’s all achieved by the sword and blood. The heart is pierced, out comes a drop of water, which is matter joined to the drop of blood which is spirit, which signifies the union of spirit and matter, compassion, understanding, and true charity.” MJ, Les Amitiés et les amours, ed. Didier Gompel-Netter, 3 vols. (Nantes: Éditions du Petit Véhicule, 2003), 2:24.

48. SM, in O, 190.

49. Ibid., 195.

50. Ibid., 245. Apollinaire, in his gossip column for L’Intransigeant, described the footbridges erected on the Place de la Concorde so pedestrians could avoid getting their feet wet, and in his “Echoes” for Paris-Journal he reported how famous writers responded to the catastrophe: Gide smiling maliciously as he watched the floodwater invading the majestic front hall of the poet Francis Vielé-Griffin; Barrès going to the flooded rue Félicien-David to dream “about water, sexual ecstasy, and death,” and so forth. Apollinaire, Petites merveilles, 25, 85. 

51. SM, in O, 235.

52. Ibid., 193.

53. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 76; Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:40.

54. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 77, argues for 1910, instead of 1911 as proposed by Gompel-Netter and Marcoux in Les Propos et les jours, 32. Andreu, Vie et mort, 86.

55. Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 32; Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 77.

56. MJ to Salmon, April 16, 1910, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:41.

57. Ibid., 1:45; Pierre-Marcel Adéma, “Max Jacob et quelques oeuvres d’André Salmon de 1904 à 1940,” in André Salmon, ed. P.-M-Adéma et al. (Paris: Nizet, 1987), 12.

58. MJ to Salmon, May 1910, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:45.

59. Hélène Henry and Alexandre Jacob, “Lettre de 1866,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 9 (1987): 44.

60. Hélène Henry, “Max Jacob aux archives du Finistère,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 10 (1988): 34; Guyon, “Un copain,” 86. 

61. MJ to Kahnweiler, c. 1910, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:50.

62. Ibid., 1:51.

63. Henry, “Jacob aux archives,” 35; Henry, “Bouchaballe ‘un’ ou La comédie retrouvée,” 10.

64. Allier, on the other hand, never came to much as a writer. He made a stab at journalism in Paris, fought and was wounded and gassed in World War I, served as a magistrate in Algeria, and returned to Quimper, bitter and disappointed, to live on his pension, writing local guidebooks, saints’ tales, and mostly unpublished memoirs. Hélène Henry, “Dans l’ombre de Max Jacob: Le Quimpérois Pierre Allier, 1887–1959,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 1 (1978): 35–56.

65. Ibid., 38.

66. Hélène Henry, “Main basse sur la ville, ou ‘Kemper Cancans,’” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 5 (1983): 83–87. Jacob and Allier also collaborated on a comic revue about the politics of Quimper, “Kemper Cancans,” but the project came to nothing when the authors refused to submit to censorship from the town hall. 

67. Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:51, 53.

68. François Chapon, Le Peintre et le livre (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), 102–4.

69. Guillaume Apollinaire, Petites flâneries d’art, ed. Pierre Caizergues (Montpellier: Bibliothèque artistique et littéraire, 1980), 71. Apollinaire reported in his column of art gossip in Paris-Journal, May 23, 1914, that Vlaminck and Kahnweiler were taking “a cruise” down the Seine from Bougival to Paris in the Saint-Matorel to see the Ballets Russes.

70. Pierre Reverdy, Le Voleur de Talan (1917; reprinted Paris: Flammarion, 1967), 164.

71. Ibid., 22.

72. Ibid., 38.

73. Ibid., 165.

74. MJ, “Lettre de Max Jacob à Charles Vildrac,” Création 5, no. 13 (1974): 13–14. Jacob’s periphrases in this letter suggest that he wasn’t enthusiastic about Vildrac’s tame free verse. But he expresses affection for the man and an appreciation for the “frankness” and “freshness” of Vildrac’s style. Most revealingly, he predicts that Vildrac will make his mark as a playwright, which turned out to be true when his plays L’Indigent and Le Paquebot Tenacity won popular success. In 1910, Vildrac, with his friend (and brother-in-law) Georges Duhamel, published a treatise on free verse, Notes sur la technique poétique, which influenced contemporary French poetry and, through Eliot and Pound, poetry in English. 

75. MJ, “On ferme,” “L’Histoire,” and “Parenthèse,” Nouvelles de la république des lettres, October 1910, 26.

76. The new title for “Tristesse” suggests the covert way Jacob had of dramatizing his most vulnerable feelings; when it appeared in OBM, the poet would continue the game of masking by renaming it “Aveu” (Confession) in OBM, in O, 290.

77. MJ, “Histoire des Prisonniers” and “La Mère et la fille repenties” in “Nouvelles de Guichin,” Pan, October–November 1910, 656–62.

78. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 87.

79. Ibid., 89.

80. Details of the printing are given in the back of the Birault edition; Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 89. The copies on antique Japanese paper cost 150 francs, after the initial subscriber price of 120 francs, and those on Hollande paper rose from 60 francs to 75 francs. When World War I broke out, and Kahnweiler’s collection was appropriated by the French government, nine copies on Japanese paper and fifty-nine on Hollande remained and were scattered in the scandalous government auctions of Kahnweiler’s property after the war. One can be admired in the New York Public Library. 

81. “Jacob et Picasso vivent de compagnie / L’un peignant des tableaux et l’autre divaguant / Pablo emmerde sa toile Max va m’encaguant, / L’un d’eux a sa manière et l’autre sa manie,” in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 86. Freely translated to preserve Apollinaire’s scatology. Encaguer is a rare slang word for shitting, used in expressions akin to “emmerder,” to annoy someone.

82. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 86, 89n9. The alternate French lines: “Ne dites pas Jacob pédé / N’aime pas le con.”

83. Palmer White, Poiret (New York: Clarkson, 1973), 53.

84. Salmon, Jacob, poète, 33.

85. Olivier, Picasso et ses amis, 177; Olivier, Souvenirs intimes, 240–44.

86. MJ to Bloch, June 7, 1911, in “Lettres à Bloch, 1re partie,” 131.

87. Ibid., 133. The reference is to three Unanimist plays. Bloch’s play L’Inquiète (The Anxious Lady) had just been produced at the Odéon. L’Armée dans la ville (The Army in the City) was by Jules Romains, and La Lumière by Georges Duhamel.

88. Pierre Jakez Hélias, “La Côte, ou Max Jacob collecteur de lui-même,” Centre de Recherches Max Jacob, no. 7 (1985): 11.

89. Ibid., 6, 7. Jules Romains, in a memoir published in his old age (“Max Jacob,” Revue des deux mondes, October 1970, 13–18), claims that Jacob told him of finding a Breton worker in the Métro who would translate the poems of La Côte into Breton. But Romains’s piece is so full of errors that it can hardly be trusted. (He remembers Gustave Gompel as a shoe manufacturer, not a department store magnate; he reports that Jacob “didn’t especially admire” Picasso’s art (!); he thinks Jacob went right after his vision to a priest at the Sacré Coeur (whereas it was in the little local church). Romains’s library had been ransacked by the Gestapo, and he was an old man relying on a faulty memory. Some of the anecdotes he recounts have a ring of truth, such as his recollection that Jacob found sexual partners in the police force.

90. René Plantier, “Max Jacob, Luzel, et la Bretagne: Étude des sources de La Côte,” Centre de Recherches Max Jacob, no. 1 (1978): 7–34, for a detailed study of Jacob’s transformations of Luzel’s material. I disagree with Plantier’s assertion that there’s nothing distinctively Breton about La Côte, as with his claim that there’s no difference between La Côte and Jacob’s later Breton work, Morven le Gaélique.

91. C, 40.

92. Hélias, “La Côte, ou Jacob,” 11, 12.

93. MJ to Tzara, February 16, 1916, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:116. Fort’s pseudo-folk songs in verse paragraphs, published in volume after volume of his Ballades françaises, are saccharine and decorative and have nothing in common with the rough old French songs from the provinces. Fort was elected Prince des Poètes in 1912. Oddly enough, some of his ballads did enter modern folklore by being set to music later by Georges Brassens. Francis Jammes was a poet from the Pyrenees whose lyrics of country life, especially in his book De l’angélus de l’aube à l’angélus du soir, had been welcomed in Paris as a refreshing antidote to high Symbolism.

94. Max Jacob and Jean Paulhan, Correspondance, ed. Anne Kimball (Paris: Éditions Paris-Méditerranée, 2005), 39.

95. MJ to Jean Grenier, September 21, 1924, in Lettres à un ami: Correspondance 1922–1937 avec Jean Grenier (Paris: Le temps qu’il fait, 1982), 37.

96. Jean de L’Escritoire, Paris-Midi (June 1911), n.p. André Billy used the pen name “Jean de L’Escritoire.”

97. Richardson, Life, 2:181.

98. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 87.

99. The episode of the stolen heads and Apollinaire’s imprisonment is narrated in detail in Steegmuller, Apollinaire, and in Richardson, Life, vol. 2. The Mona Lisa, it turned out, had been stolen by an employee of the Louvre, Vincenzo Peruggia; he was apprehended in 1913 when he tried to sell it to the Uffizi.

100. Steegmuller, Apollinaire, 223.

101. MJ to Kahnweiler, September 12, 1911, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:60.

102. Paul Poiret, En habillant l’époque (Paris: Grasset, 1930), 153.

103. Ether: MJ to Dunoyer de Segonzac, August 5, 1911, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 31. Raynal’s room: MJ to Maurice Raynal, September 1911, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:61.

104. MJ to Kahnweiler, October 6, 1911, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:66.

105. N.a., “École Druidique,” Hommes du jour, no. 189 (September 2, 1911).

106. Octave Béliard, “Le Barde Druidique,” Hommes du jour, no. 195 (October 14, 1911). In May 1913, Béliard would attack Apollinaire’s book of art criticism, Méditations esthétiques: Les Peintres cubistes in Les Hommes du jour. (Apollinaire, Les peintres cubistes, 32.)

107. MJ to Kahnweiler, October 6, 1911, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:64.

108. “À Quimper-Corentin,” Cri du Peuple, October 28, 1911, 3.

109. Judith Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” in William Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 380.

110. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler with François Crémieux, My Galleries and Painters, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Viking, 1971), 40–43. (Translation of Mes galeries et mes peintres, Gallimard, 1961.) Pierre Assouline, L’homme de l’art: D.-H. Kahnweiler 1884–1979 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 166. Richardson, Life, 2:211.

111. Apollinaire’s occasional journalism under various rubrics such as “Echoes,” “Silhouettes,” and “Chronicles,” often anonymous, is published in Apollinaire, Petites Merveilles, and in Apollinaire, Petites Flâneries d’art. Apollinaire’s signed journalism is collected in Apollinaire, Oeuvres en prose complètes, ed. Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), vol 2. 

112. Salmon, Salmon on French Modern Art, 57; Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” 380; Richardson, Life, 2:212. 

113. Apollinaire, Oeuvres en prose complètes, 2:318.

114. Apollinaire, Anecdotiques, 47.

115. Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 185–89.

116. MJ to Salmon, January 11, 1911, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:59. Carco—François Carcopino-Tusoli (1886–1958)—made his name as a chronicler of the lives of thugs, prostitutes, and Bohemian artists in Paris. Jacob detested the book he eventually published, De Montmartre au Quartier Latin (Paris: Albin Michel, 1927), writing to his old friend the actress Sylvette Fillacier that it was full of “lies and horrors.” Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 283.

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1. See Chapter 3 for discussion of the Doucet manuscript. MJ, Le Christ à Montparnasse, ms. 7198-2, BLJD.

2. MJ to Kahnweiler, April 28, 1910, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:43. The so-called Persian poems, which survived in OBM as twenty-four miniatures called “Persian Poems” (OBM, in O, 300), seem to have been inspired by prose renditions of lyrics from the twelfth-century Persian poet Saadi and other classic Persian poets Jacob would have found in the recently published anthology of translations by Hoceyne Azad, La Roseraie du Savoir (Leyde: Brill, 1906). The vogue for these poems is evident in a group adapted and published by Franz Toussaint under the title “Le Jardin des roses” (The Rose Garden) in Apollinaire’s journal Les Soirées de Paris, no. 9 (1912): 265–68. Rendered in prose, they superficially resemble modern French prose poems.

3. MJ to Kahnweiler, October 4, 1911, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:62.

4. Ibid., 1:63.

5. This was the heading on the draft of a prospectus he sent to Kahnweiler on October 6, 1911 (in which he pretends that Max Jacob, a sailor in the Merchant Marine, had collected and edited Matorel’s poems after the “saint’s” death).

6. MJ to Kahnweiler, October 6, 1911, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:64–67.

7. MJ, “Grand récitatif dramatique pour salons,” OBM, in O, 265.

8. MJ, “Variation d’une formule,” OBM, in O, 268; “La leçon de musique,” ibid., 271; “Avenue du Maine,” ibid., 269. See Chapter 4 for the letter to Picasso: “Déménage tes méninges, ange! Ménage et déménage.” 

9. “ . . . finding his way,” OBM, in O, 271. MJ, “Statue fêlée,” ibid., 272.

10. Ibid., 277.

11. MJ, “Situation des gens de lettres,” ibid., 285.

12. MJ, “Le cheval sauvage et gai . . . ,” OBM, in O, 293. Wrongly listed as “unpublished” in Maria Green and Christine Andreucci, Bibliographie des poèmes de Max Jacob parus en revue (Saint-Étienne: Université de Saint-Étienne, 1991), 34.

13. MJ, “Paysages,” OBM, in O, 292; “Les poissons sont des yeux . . . ,” ibid., 302.

14. MJ to Kahnweiler, October 6, 1911, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:64.

15. In a letter to René Villard, Jacob wrote in December 1936 that he had given up trying to publish his exegetical studies, “his favorite work.” MJ, Lettres à Villard, 71. But in May 1939, in his last letter to the young Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès, he wrote (heartbreakingly) that he was “out of this world” and expected “martyrdom” but that he was working on a book about the Scriptures that would “illuminate the question of the Biblical role of the Jews.” He imagined that the book would be published by the Nouvelle Revue Française and that it was his “duty.” MJ, Lettres à Edmond Jabès (Alexandria: Éditions du Scarabée, 1945), 61. In 1941, he wrote to Henry Lasserre about lassitude in finishing his book on the Scriptures, which the anti-Jewish laws of Vichy would prevent him from publishing in any case. Philippe Schmitt-Kummerlee, “Un manuscrit retrouvé: Vrai sens de la religion catholique,” Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 7 (October 2007): 90.

Jacob’s key studies in Scriptural exegesis may be found in two essays in Reverdy’s journal Nord-Sud in 1917 (MJ, “La Cinquième plaie du Crucifié et la connaissance tragique de Nietzsche,” Nord-Sud, no. 4–5 [June–July 1917]: 15–17; “La Conscience psychologique et la cinqiuème plaie du Crucifié,” Nord-Sud, no. 6–7 [August–September 1917]: 15–17); in two improvised lectures on his typological speculations in Madrid in 1926; and in two articles translated into Spanish in the journal Cruz y Raya (MJ, “El verdadero sentido de la religión católica,” trans. J. Bergamin, Cruz y Raya, no. 13 [April–June 1934]; “Las Plagas de Egipto y el Dolor,” trans. J. Bergamin, Cruz y Raya, no. 18 [September 1934]). Christine Van Rogger Andreucci gives an account of these articles in “Mise au point sur l’interprétation des Écritures par Max Jacob: De l’initiation à la charité chrétienne,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 4 (1981–82): 11–22. The French manuscript original for the first article, “Vrai sens de la religion catholique,” was discovered and published by Philippe Schmitt-Kummerlee, “Un manuscrit retrouvé.” A draft of the French original of “Las Plagas de Egipto y el Dolor” is preserved in the Médiathèque d’Orléans, ms. 2271. Certain paragraphs may also be found in the manuscript “Notes diverses pour l’Anatomie religieuse,” ms. 8.140.3, BLJD.

16. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 85n10.

17. Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:68.

18. MJ to Kahnweiler, December 2, 1911, ibid.

19. MJ to Marcel Olin, December 1911, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 34.

20. Ibid.

21. MJ to Bloch, end of December 1911, “Lettres à Bloch, 1re partie,” 134.

22. MJ to Tzara, February 26, 1916, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:115.

23. MJ to Michel Leiris, December 6, 1921, in MJ, Lettres à Michel Leiris, ed. Christine Van Rogger Andreucci (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001), 36.

24. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 90.

25. MJ to Bloch, end of December 1911, “Lettres à Bloch, 1re partie,” 134.

26. Apollinaire, Oeuvres en prose complètes, 2:407.

27. Ibid., 2:410. It’s hard to argue with Apollinaire’s judgment. Only the year before, in 1911, the Futurists in Milan knew nothing of the radical developments in painting that were taking place in Paris. The young painter Gino Severini, who now lived in Paris and was good friends with Picasso, Jacob, and the gang, was appalled at the provincialism of his friend Umberto Boccioni and the other Futurists when he visited them in Milan in 1911. On his urging, Marinetti, who had funds, paid for Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Luigi Russolo to travel to Paris and spend two weeks being guided around the studios by Severini. They were entranced by the work they saw. Their belligerence and claims of priority a year later thus seemed little less than outrageous. Severini considered himself an avant-garde artist and signed the two Futurist manifestos of painting in 1910, but he had serious reservations about his friends’ work and came to regard Marinetti as a public relations “manager,” whose goal was “a vain and materialistic exhibitionism.” Gino Severini, La vita di un pittore (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1965), 106–15. Futurist painting was first proclaimed in two manifestos in the spring of 1910: “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters” published as a leaflet by Poesia in Milan, February 11, 1910; and “Futurist Painting: Manifesto,” published by Poesia, April 11, 1910. Both were signed by Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla, and Severini, in that order. Caws, Manifesto, 178–84.

28. Apollinaire, Anecdotiques, 16, 64.

29. On March 7, 1914, Apollinaire’s journal Les Soirées de Paris published an official, notarized statement by Arthur Cravan withdrawing his allegation in his journal Maintenant that Apollinaire was Jewish, thus avoiding a duel. Apollinaire’s seconds, Jérôme Tharaud, “Homme de lettres et Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur,” and Claude Chérau, “Artiste peintre,” followed Cravan’s declaration with this statement: “As our friend Guillaume Apollinaire has accepted this rectification as sufficient, we have notified M. Arthur Cravan of our reception of his letter, and as agreed between him and us, we present it in this notarized document to be published in the press, and we declare the incident closed.” Soirées de Paris, no. 22 (February 1914): 131.

30. Ardengo Soffici, Autoritratto d’artista italiano nel quadro del suo tempo, vol. 3, Il Salto vitale (Florence: Vallecchi, 1954), 564. Soffici had first met Jacob and Picasso in 1901 in the chambers of the weekly Le Cri de Paris, a spin-off from the high Symbolist journal La Revue blanche, where the young Italian was trying to sell his drawings. Jacob was peddling Picasso’s drawing, as he often did in those days. Soffici gives a vivid glimpse of the pair: “One of them, a thin Jewish type, pale, smooth-shaven, already bald and missing teeth, wrapped up in an overcoat too light for the wintry season, the other short and thick-set, equally smooth-shaven but with an energetic expression, his dark and very mobile eyes gleaming under a severe forehead crossed by a lock of black hair hanging down over his eyebrows. They had come together to offer to Natanson [the editor of La Revue blanche and Le Cri de Paris], as a cover for Le Cri de Paris, an ink drawing of a perverse-looking woman, a little in the style then much in fashion, of the English Pre-Raphaelite Aubray Bearsley [sic], the illustrator of Oscar Wilde’s Salome.” Soffici, Il Salto vitale, 3:323.

31. Henri Hertz, “La Côte,” Phalange, no. 1–7 (April 1912): 329–32.

32. MJ to Bloch, spring 1912, in “Lettres à Bloch, 1re partie,” 137–38.

33. Picasso and Apollinaire, Correspondance, 93.

34. Ibid. See also Richardson, Life, 2:221–33.

35. Severini, Vita di un pittore, 125–26.

36. Ardengo Soffici, Autoritratto di artista italiano nel quadro del suo tempo, vol. 4, Virilità (Florence: Vallecchi, 1955), 270.

37. Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” 391–93; Assouline, L’homme de l’art, 173–76.

38. Richardson, Life, 2:260.

39. Picasso and Apollinaire, Correspondance, 94–99, records Apollinaire’s various addresses in the summer and fall of 1912.

40. Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” 399; Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 95n31.

41. MJ to Bloch, August 2, 1912, in “Lettres à Bloch, 1re partie,” 142. 

42. Picasso, from Céret, wrote Kahnweiler on June 5, asking if Gleizes and Metzinger’s book had appeared (Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” 395). On Paul Fort’s banquet, see Apollinaire, Anecdotiques, 82.

43. MJ to Bloch, August 2, 1912, in “Lettres à Bloch, 1re partie,” 142.

44. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 92.

45. MJ to Kahnweiler, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:71. This letter was composed sometime between August 2, when he wrote to Bloch to announce his arrival in Quimper, and August 20, when he wrote Kahnweiler from Loctudy, where he was the guest of the Poirets for a month.

46. MJ to Kahnweiler, c. August 1912, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:74.

47. On Frick, Apollinaire, Oeuvres en prose complètes, 3:124. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 90n32.

48. MJ to Kahnweiler, c. August 1912, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:87. Garnier has confused the order of the letters to Kahnweiler in this section of the Correspondence. This letter was obviously written in August 1912 before Jacob’s visit to the Poirets and should have been placed earlier in the sequence. The letter on pp. 83–86 dates from 1911, not 1912.

49. Ibid., 1:88.

50. MJ to Bloch, c. January–March 1913, in “Lettres à Bloch, 1re partie,” 145. MJ to Kahnweiler, December 9, 1912, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:82.

51. In 1929, Gallimard published an edition in the Nouvelle Revue Française.

52. Frédéric Lefèvre, “Une heure avec M. Max Jacob, poète, romancier, et humoriste,” Nouvelles littéraires, April 12, 1924, 1–2.

53. Béalu, Dernier visage, 54.

54. Saul Bellow thought so; he adored Max Jacob’s short fiction. Interview by author.

55. CI, in O, 722.

56. Ibid., 727.

57. Ibid., 719, 720, 722.

58. Guiette, Vie, 55.

59. CI, in O, 740, 742.

60. In the Breton Album Jacob created for his banker patron Robert Zunz in 1939, he described the modest house in the back courtyard and the scandal of the daughter who got pregnant, killed her baby, and went to prison but was freed and married a doctor, becoming “a lady.” The album is in the private collection of Gérard Zunz. 

61. MJ, “Tablettes attribuées à un empereur romain” (Tablets Attributed to a Roman Emperor), CI, in O, 793–96.

62. Théodore Le Hars, mayor of Quimper for many years, was defeated in 1912 by a coalition of Socialists and conservatives. Henry, “Bouchaballe ‘un’ ou La comédie retrouvée,” 12.

63. MJ to Kahnweiler, c. October 1912, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:78.

64. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 93.

65. MJ, Doucet ms., Le Christ à Montparnasse, ms. 7198-2, BLJD. He would publish it the following year in La Phalange as “Prière” (Prayer) and would place it finally in DT. This poem’s first line survives in three different versions, which reveal Jacob’s struggle to move from a magical polytheism to a more orthodox monotheism. MJ, “Pas encore,” DT, in O, 481.

66. Hélène Henry quotes the letter and the poem in “Dans l’ombre de Max Jacob,” 41. The poet Henri Hertz made his living as a journalist and editor and also wrote fiction. He had met Apollinaire and Salmon in 1903 in the Symbolist circle of La Plume and met Jacob the following year. In 1909, he co-founded the leftist journal Démocratie sociale, and in 1932 he served as the secretary general of the French section of the World Jewish Congress. He and Emma fled Paris after the passage of the Vichy anti-Semitic legislation in 1940 and spent the war in Lyon, Grenoble, and Brittany, engaged in clandestine work. 

67. The early version, “Mille autres regrets,” appeared in La Phalange, no. 86 (August 1913): 125. The final version, “Mille regrets,” was published in LC, in O, 564. Jacob’s alchemical symbols on this page of the notebook from 1912 all come from a single page in chapter 74 of volume 1 of Cornelius Agrippa’s La Philosphie Occulte ou la magie, first published in Latin in 1533, a book Jacob had studied since boyhood. The symbols represent the “intelligence of the moon” and various “demons of the moon.” A German doctor, astrologer, and magician, Agrippa served various European monarchs and is still known for his ingenious versions of magic squares, grids in which the numbers of every column, every row, and the two main diagonals add up to the same sum. (Agrippa associated these numbers with the signs of the zodiac.) Cornelius Agrippa, La Philosophie occulte ou la magie (Paris: Librairie générale des sciences occultes, 1910), 1:308.

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1. Accounts of “The Golden Mean” (Section d’Or) exhibit may be found in Assouline, L’homme de l’art, 180; Steegmuller, Apollinaire, 235; and Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes, 25. The text of Raynal’s article is reproduced in Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighton, A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism 1906–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 333–40.

2. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 93. Seckel notes that Jacob’s name was erroneously included in the table of contents of the journal’s single issue. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 95n32.

3. Ibid., 96.

4. Artemisia Calcagni Abrami and Lucia Chimirri, “Sodalizii di genio,” Le edizioni de Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (Florence: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, 1995), 45.

5. Guillaume Apollinaire, Correspondance avec les artistes, 1903–1918, ed. Laurence Campa and Peter Read (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 87–88.

6. Meryle Secrest, Modigliani: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2011), 170.

7. Reverdy, Voleur de Talan, 168.

8. Apollinaire, Oeuvres en prose complètes, 2:537.

9. Ibid., 2:538.

10. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 96.

11. Sylvette Fillacier, Chante cigale (Paris: Table Ronde, 1960), 292.

12. MJ to Bloch, c. January–March 1913, in “Lettres à Bloch, 1e partie,” 145.

13. André Salmon, Tendres canailles (Paris: Ollendorff, 1913).

14. Peyre, Jacob quotidien, 90.

15. Picasso and Apollinaire, Correspondance, 102.

16. Apollinaire, Oeuvres en prose complètes, 2:1508. Assouline, L’homme de l’art, 211–17. Kahnweiler was right to be concerned: Méditations esthétiques: Les Peintres cubistes wasn’t taken seriously in France, but it had enormous impact abroad and was rapidly translated into Russian, English, Spanish, and Hungarian.

17. Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” 416.

18. Ibid., 417.

19. Ibid., 416.

20. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 97–98.

21. Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:91–95. Garnier misdates the letters. The one to Apollinaire dated May 2, 1913, cannot have been written then, as it refers to the death of Picasso’s father, who didn’t die until May 3. 

22. Ibid., 1:93.

23. Richardson, Life, 2:276–78.

24. Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” 417.

25. MJ, “Honneur de la sardane et de la tenora,” LC, in O, 558. Dedicated to Picasso, the poem wouldn’t appear until 1921 in LC. Richardson calls it a prose poem. It is most definitely written in verse. Richardson, Life, 2:280.

26. Picasso and Apollinaire, Correspondance, 102–5. This portrait had caused Picasso considerable concern when he heard it was printed in blue; he wrote Apollinaire several times from Céret asking him to check the proofs.

27. MJ to Apollinaire, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:94.

28. MJ to Kahnweiler, ibid.

29. Apollinaire, Oeuvres poétiques, 39.

30. The word ancien being pronounced as three syllables, as the rule of dieresis permits.

31. Louise Faure-Favier, a close friend of Apollinaire’s, narrates the scene of the removal of punctuation and of the deliberations at the Mercure in her memoir. Louise Faure-Favier, Souvenirs sur Guillaume Apollinaire (Paris: Grasset, 1945), 47.

32. Apollinaire, “Palais,” in Oeuvres poétiques, 61.

33. Steegmuller, Apollinaire, 250.

34. Faure-Favier, Souvenirs, 103–5.

35. MJ to Alfred Vallette, June 1913, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:96.

36. Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” 418.

37. The etchings are reproduced in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 104–6.

38. Soffici recounts this comic scene in Autoritratto d’artista; Fine di un mondo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1955), 4:196–203.

39. Marinetti had never lived for any extended period in France, but he had been educated in French schools in Alexandria, while Soffici had lived for years in Paris, knew all the contemporary artists there, and contributed to the major avant-garde journals.

40. Jean-François Rodriguez, “Su alcune lettere inedite di Max Jacob a Soffici,” Sodalizi del genio: Le edizioni di Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, ed. Artemisia Calcagni Abrami and Lucia Chimirri (Florence: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, 1995), 45–48.

41. MJ, “L’Établissement d’une communauté au Brésil,” Lacerba 1, no. 12 (June 15, 1913): 126; LC, in O, 573.

42. Luciano de Maria, Marinetti e i futuristi (Milan: Garzanti, 1994), 78–85.

43. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “L’immaginazione senza fili e le parole in libertà,” Lacerba 1, no. 12 (June 15, 1913): 121–24.

44. Ardengo Soffici, “Max Jacob,” Lacerba 1, no. 12 (June 15, 1913): 126. The tale of the encounter with the Virgin also appears in Alberto Savinio’s gossipy (and not terribly well informed) memoir, Souvenirs (Rome: Sellerio, 1989), 27. The story became a standard feature of the Jacob myth.

45. In the short story “Le Haschischin,” Reverdy describes Jacob’s being locked up overnight and released in the morning: “In the daylight he examined his crumpled clothes, his hat smeared with mud, and rather satisfied after all he methodically assembled his impressions of a first night spent in jail / So far from Heaven.” Pierre Reverdy, Risques et périls (Paris: Flammarion, 1972), 137. Originally published in 1922 in La Vie des lettres et des arts.

46. Richardson, Life, 2:281.

47. MJ to Bloch, September 28, 1913, in “Lettres à Bloch, 1re partie,” 148.

48. Giovanni Papini, “Introibo,” Lacerba 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1913): 1.

49. Umberto Boccioni, “Per l’ignoranza italiana, sillabario pittorico,” Lacerba 1, no. 16 (August 15, 1913): 179.

50. Giovanni Papini, “Il massacro delle donne,” Lacerba 2, no. 7 (April 1, 1914): 97.

51. “L’ANTITRADITION FUTURISTE,” in Steegmuller, Apollinaire, 262–65.

52. Rodriguez, “Su alcune lettere,” 47.

53. “Le Divan de Monsieur Max Jacob,” Lacerba 1, no. 14 (July 15, 1913): 157. The poems are printed, weirdly out of order, in Poésie présente, no. 77 (December 1990): 57–98.

54. MJ, “Mille autres regrets,” and “Prière,” Phalange, no. 86 (1913): 125–26.

55. Henri Hertz, “Contribution à la figure de Max Jacob,” Europe (January 1970): 138–39.

56. Severini, Vita di un pittore, 93.

57. Ibid., 153–56; Billy Klüver and Julie Martin, Kiki’s Paris (New York: Abrams, 1989), 50–51.

58. MJ, “République et révolutions chinoises,” Lacerba 1, no. 21 (November 1, 1913): 74–76.

59. MJ to Bloch, October 8, 1913, in “Lettres à Bloch, 1re partie,”150.

60. Conrad Moricand, La Vie horrifique et sublime de Conrad Moricand, alias Claude Valence, dit Coco l’Etoile, homme de lettres et de dessins, unpublished manuscript. A copy of the unpaginated original is in the Archives départementales du Loiret, ms. BH M 5226 (1–2). Moricand’s memoirs are unreliable when he is relaying stories about la bande à Picasso he has heard secondhand from Jacob and Salmon, and the man himself is profoundly untrustworthy—a narcissist and pedophile who, when he lost his fortune in 1934, made a small living casting horoscopes and writing astrological articles and relying on rich patrons (like Anaïs Nin). During World War II, he collaborated with the Vichy government and the Nazis as a journalist for Radio Paris and later for propaganda radio in Germany. He knew Jacob well and “collaborated” with him—in another sense—on the astrological book Miroir d’astrologie; when he writes about scenes he actually lived, like meeting Jacob at the Rotonde, the stories ring true.

61. MJ, “Boute-en-train,” Soirées de Paris, no. 18 (November 15, 1913): 25–26. MJ, L’Échelle de Jacob: Recueil d’inédits, ed. Nicole and José-Emmanuel Cruz (Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1994), 29. William Kulik translated it as “Life of the Party” in his volume The Selected Poems of Max Jacob (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1999), 50.

62. A message téléphonique was a telegram-like innovation by which the person dictated a message at the post office, which would then pass it along to the recipient’s post office by telephone and have it delivered as a written message that day.

63. Alexander Dickow has translated the sequence ingeniously in his manuscript, Selections from “Le Laboratoire central” (Wakefield, forthcoming).

64. MJ, “Le Bal masqué,” “Quelques personnages du bal masqué: I, Malvina; II, Marsupiau,” Soirées de Paris, no. 19 (December 15, 1913): 29–32. “Le Bal masqué” is reprinted in LC, in O, 620; “Malvina” in LC, in O, 624, lacking its original ninth line (“Diabète est à la fois, pour moi, diable et bête”). “Marsupiau” appeared in LC, in O, 622, with small revisions: the masculine “chéris” (my dears) of line 5 has been made feminine, and the phrase at the end of the original line 6, “Pas de coton,” has been kicked down to become line 7 on its own. Jacob justified much of the highly indented lineation of the versions in Soirées to a predominant left margin in LC.

65. Apollinaire described the duel the next day in Paris-Journal. Apollinaire, Oeuvres en prose complètes, 766. Klüver and Martin give a more extended account with dramatic photographs from the fight. Klüver and Martin, Kiki’s Paris, 54–55.

66. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Chronique mensuelle,” Soirées de Paris, no. 18 (November 15, 1913): 2, 3.

67. Umberto Boccioni, “Simultaneità futurista,” Lacerba 2, no. 1 (January 1, 1914): 12.

68. Chapon, Le Peintre et le livre, 134–37, 308.

69. Blaise Cendrars, Du monde entier au coeur du monde (Paris: Denoël, 1958; reprinted Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 58. Apollinaire, “Les Fiançailles,” in Oeuvres poétiques, 132.

70. Blaise Cendrars, “Apollinaire,” Montjoie! 2, no. 4, 5, 6 (April–June 1914): 4.

71. Faure-Favier, Souvenirs, 109–11.

72. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Nos amis les futuristes,” Soirées de Paris 3, no. 21 (February 1914): 78.

73. MJ, “Poème simultané avec superposition simple,” and “Poème simultané à deux rouleaux mobiles.” The poems appeared under those titles in the first edition of CD in 1917. In later editions, he simplified both titles to “Poème” to intensify the abstraction and also to eliminate the period flavor of “simultaneous.” CD, in O, 357.

74. MJ, “La Rue Ravignan de Montmartre,” in “Extracts from Unpublished Volumes,” trans. Alice Morning, New Age, February 18, 1915, 432. Hastings practically rewrote Jacob’s poem. The French original first appeared in Les Soirées de Paris 3, no. 21 (February 1914): 115. Elizabeth Bishop translated the poem but never published it; her version is in her papers at Vassar College.

75. CD, in O, 376. Jacob reprinted neither of the other poems from this issue of Les Soirées de Paris. “La Vie d’artiste” and “Romances dans le gout de temps: Printemps” are charming pieces; the first in rhyming alexandrines, the second in free verses all rhyming on the syllable “ou.”

76. Reading different accounts of the auction of La Peau de l’Ours can be confusing because Picasso’s star painting was known by two different titles (Les Bateleurs and La Famille des Saltimbanques) and because some authors (Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” 425; Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 110; Assouline, L’homme de l’art, 223) cite the basic price of 11,500 francs, while others (Richardson, Life, 2:297; Michael Fitzgerald, “Skin Games,” Art in America, February 1992, 78) use the final price including the 10 percent premium paid by the buyer, 12,650 francs. See also André Level’s firsthand account of La Peau de l’Ours and the auction in Souvenirs d’un collectionneur (Paris: Alain Mazo, 1959), 17ff.

77. The works are reproduced in Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” 317, 424, and in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 110.

78. Picasso and Apollinaire, Correspondance, 110–11.

79. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 110.

80. Sylvette Fillacier, “Parmi vos lettres, Max,” Europe 36, no. 348–49 (April–May 1958): 79–80.

81. Richardson, Life, 2:299.

82. Ibid., 2:292–94.

83. Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” 424.

84. MJ, “Printemps et cinématographe mêlés,” Soirées de Paris 3, no. 23 (April 1914): 219. DT, in O, 455. In the original version, there is no punctuation after line 3 (“Allons au Bois si ça m’amuse”); in DT he has conformed to correct orthography by inserting a semicolon after “m’amuse.”

85. Richard Aldington, “Some Recent French Poets,” Egoist 1, no. 12 (June 15, 1914): 221–30. This issue also carried a section of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and an article on Wyndham Lewis by Ezra Pound.

86. Apollinaire, Petites Flâneries d’art, 56, 58, 71.

87. Faure-Favier, Souvenirs, 113–14.

88. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 112.

89. Assouline, L’homme de l’art, 227–28.

90. MJ, “Surpris et charmé,” Soirées de Paris, no. 25 (June 1914): 328–33. RB, in O, 857. Hélène Henry described Morvan’s reaction in “Max Jacob aux archives de Finistère,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 10 (1988): 33–48. See my extended discussion in Chapter 2.

91. Pound composed the manifesto but published it under the name of his colleague Flint in the March 1913 issue of Poetry. Reprinted under his own name in “A Retrospect,” Pavannes and Divisions (1918), and in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 3.

92. Salmon, Souvenirs, 2:233. Jacob’s poem turns somersaults in its rhymes and plays with conventions of whodunit plots. This version has a short prose section, “Partie critique,” giving Jacob’s analysis of the Fantômas formula and deriding the style; he remarks also on the use of character types—“the characters are numerous, new, precise, picturesque, and rise to the level of type as in Balzac or Eugène Sue”—a method he would use in his own fiction. MJ, “Écrit pour la S.A.F.,” Soirées de Paris, no. 26 (July–August 1914): 402–8. DT, in O, 462.

93. “Une noce juive monstre,” Paris-Journal, July 5, 1914.

94. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Le Pauvre peintre juif et les chameaux,” Paris-Journal, July 22, 1914.

95. Christopher Clark, in The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), shows how the major powers turned a local Balkan conflict into a massive war, arguing that French and Russian belligerence and disregard for Austrian security contributed to the catastrophe. Readers of French newspapers would have perceived only that Austria, and then Germany, had launched the fight.

96. Assouline, L’homme de l’art, 230.

97. Rodriguez, “Su alcune lettere,” 50.

98. MJ to Bloch, n.d. 1914, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 141.

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1. MJ to Bloch, September 29, 1914, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 142.

2. Journée financière et politique, August 3, 1914, 1.

3. Journal, August 3, 1914, 1.

4. L’Intransigeant, August 11, 1914, 1; “Notre Effort en Haute-Alsace,” Journal, August 11, 1914, 1.

5. “La Grande bataille,” Paris-Midi, August 12, 1914, 1.

6. MJ to Fillacier, September 10, 1914, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 39.

7. MJ to Bloch, September 29, 1914, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 143. Jacob gave other accounts of his stay in Enghien to Kahnweiler and Maurice Raynal (Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:96–103).

8. MJ to Bloch, September 29, 1914, in, “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 143.

9. “France Will Fight On: An Interview with M. Clemenceau,” Daily Mail, August 31, 1914, 1.

10. “La Misère est proche,” Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, August 31, 1914.

11. MJ to Bloch, September 29, 1914, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 143.

12. New York Herald, August 24, 1914, 1.

13. New York Herald, August 25, 1914, 1.

14. Daily Mail, August 26, 1914, 1.

15. “Proclamation du gouvernement au people français,” L’Éclair, September 3, 1914, 1.

16. L’Éclair, September 9, 1914, 1.

17. MJ to Fillacier, September 10, 1914, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 39. Further details in his letter to Bloch, September 29, 1914, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 142.

18. Jacob spelled his name sometimes Lagnel, sometimes Laignel. Andreu, Vie et mort, 96. Jacob’s pencil portrait of him is in the Altounian catalogue, Max Jacob, dessins, ed. Marcelin Pleynet, Christian Parisot, and Jeanine Warnod (Paris: Shakespeare & Company, 1978), 37.

19. MJ to Kahnweiler, September 22, 1914, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:97. MJ to Bloch, September 29, 1914, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 142.

20. Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:97–101.

21. MJ to Bloch, September 29, 1914, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 142.

22. MJ to Raynal, September 23, 1914, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:100.

23. “Nos Armées ont progressé entre Reims et l’Argonne,” L’Écho de Paris, September 2, 1914, 1.

24. L’Éclair, September 30, 1914, 1.

25. MJ to Kahnweiler, September 22, 1914, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:96–99.

26. Reverdy was circumspect in this matter, as in all personal matters. To Maurice Saillet, to whom he granted a rare interview, he said of himself: “Ill suited to military service, he was employed at the Propaganda Office, but he failed there.” Reverdy, Voleur de Talan, 169.

27. Pierre Cabanne, Le Siècle de Picasso, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 2:447.

28. MJ to Maurice Raynal, n.d., 1914, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:107–8. In late December he wrote Bloch of Picasso’s “renunciation” of Cubism. MJ to Bloch, c. late December 1914, early January 1915, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 144.

29. Richardson, Life, 2:396–97.

30. MJ to Raynal, November 30, 1914, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:103–7. Jeanne Léger, with her painter husband off at war, gave feisty parties at the studio. Later in the war, many of the lonely wives of absent painters and writers gave themselves up to pagan bacchanalia—according to Conrad Moricand—embracing one another in “positions it is impossible to describe publicly.” Moricand, La Vie horrifique, n.p.

31. MJ to Raynal, November 30, 1914, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:103–7.

32. Ibid., 1:104.

33. DT, in O, 486. One can reconstruct the dates by consulting the calendar for 1914. In the journal, the entry “Monday, first day of my work of conversion” isn’t dated, and it’s followed by “Tuesday 2” which doesn’t correspond (December 2, 1914, fell on a Wednesday). But the other dates do align with December 1914: Friday 4, Saturday 5, and so forth. It’s odd that Jacob confuses the date of the apparition of Christ to him at the movies, an event that would prove fundamental to his life, but between his visions, his feverish literary work, and his chaotic personal life, he was hardly living in calendrical time. And throughout his life he was careless about dates. Years later, dictating his story to Guiette, Jacob telescoped the whole process. Guiette, Vie, 89.

34. DT, in O, 482.

35. MJ to Raynal, November 30, 1914, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:103–7.

36. Ibid.

37. MJ to Bloch, c. late December 1914, early January 1915, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 145.

38. DT, in O, 485.

39. Ibid., 486.

40. Guiette, Vie, 90.

41. DT, in O, 484.

42. MJ to Bloch, c. late December 1914, early January 1915, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 145.

43. DT, in O, 484.

44. Andreu, Vie et mort, 97–98.

45. MJ, “Dieu nous a abandonnés,” DT, in O, 480; “Le Christ à Montparnasse,” DT, in O, 491.

46. MJ to Bloch, c. late December 1914, early January 1915, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 145.

47. MJ to Apollinaire, January 7, 1915, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:110.

48. DT, in O, 484.

49. Ibid., 490.

50. Ibid., 485.

51. MJ to Bloch, c. late December 1914, early January 1915, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 145.

52. DT, in O, 486. The use of the intimate tu is conventional in prayers to God, but Jacob’s phrasing suggests other intimacies as well.

53. MJ, “Le Christ au cinématographe,” DT, in O, 488.

54. MJ to Apollinaire, January 7, 1915, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:110.

55. Andreu, Vie et mort, 101.

56. DT, in O, 501.

57. MJ to Fillacier, n.d., in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 42.

58. DT, in O, 507.

59. In two sections of the diary, Jacob gives slightly different accounts of this voice. In “Examen sur la foi” (Examination on Faith), the voice asks, “You who seek me, why do you chase me away?” In “Examen sur l’espérance,” Our Savior addresses him directly: “You flee me even as you seek me!” He published the sections under the title “Le Christ à Montparnasse” in Les Écrits nouveaux 3, no. 16–17 (April–May 1919): 70–82. DT, in O, 505–8.

60. MJ to Béalu, March 28, 1941, in Béalu, Dernier visage, 223.

61. MJ, Le Siège de Jérusalem, in Saint Matorel (Paris: Gallimard, 1936), 111.

62. MJ, “Extracts from Unpublished Volumes,” trans. Alice Morning, New Age, February 18, 1915, 431.

63. DT, in O, 501.

64. Ibid., 507.

65. Jacob quoted this remark to René Villard, August 13, 1924. MJ, Lettres à Villard, 26. Seckel reproduces Picasso’s inscription in The Imitation of Christ: “To my brother Cyprien Max Jacob in memory of his baptism Thursday February 1915—Pablo.” Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 118.

66. DT, in O, 508.

67. Cabanne, Siècle de Picasso, 2:446.

68. Richardson, Life, 2:363–67.

69. Cabanne, Siècle de Picasso, 2:447–51.

70. Richardson, Life, 2:416. Richardson discusses the Harlequin in detail in the chapter entitled “Picasso and Cocteau,” since the insistent young Cocteau had given the painter a harlequin costume in the hope of having his own portrait painted. Picasso never did paint Cocteau, though he eventually drew him. Richardson illustrates the stages by which Picasso’s harlequin became a self-portrait with an allusion to Matisse’s obscured self-portrait in Interior with Goldfish, now also at the Museum of Modern Art. Richardson’s analysis of Seated Man is even more instructive, showing photographs of various stages of this painting that is rarely seen, since it is in a private collection.

71. DT, in O, 508.

72. Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:104.

73. MJ, “Contagion,” “Préexistence des formes,” and “Conte d’Andersen,” Lacerba 2, no. 23 (November 1914): 308–10. “Contagion” appears in the 1922 edition of CD (O, 417) as “La Contagion ou les imitateurs”; “Préexistence des formes” appears in the 1922 edition of CD (O, 438), but not in the 1923 edition; and “Conte d’Andersen” appears as “Certains dédains et pas les autres,” in CD, in O, 406.

74. MJ, “Poèmes,” Lacerba 3, no. 11 (March 1915): 83. “Le périscope de Mentana,” “L’oiseau gaucher,” and “Alleluia! Sous les thuyas,” CD, in O, 364.

75. MJ, “Poème,” CD, in O, 359. On the other hand, Jacob preserved that title, “Poème dans un goût qui n’est pas le mien,” for three other poems in CD.

76. MJ, “Extracts from Unpublished Volumes,” trans. Alice Morning, New Age, February 19, 1915, 431–32; “Unpublished Extracts,” trans. Alice Morning, New Age, May 6, 1915, 15–16. MJ, “Poème,” CD, in O, 359.

77. MJ to Bloch, May 14, 1915, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 146.

78. Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:114. Severini recounts how Picasso recommended that he seek the care of a Doctor Reventos in Barcelona who was famous for curing lung diseases; Jacob, Picasso, and Hélène d’Oettingen raised the money to send Severini to Barcelona for several months, while young Jeanne and their new baby waited for him in Paris in a cramped apartment with Jeanne’s mother and Paul Fort’s mother. They lived on a pittance Jeanne’s mother earned at the town hall of the fourteenth arrondissement. Paul Fort, the Prince des Poètes, had abandoned his family to live in the country with a new mistress. Severini, Vita di un pittore, 186–89; MJ to Fillacier, March 14, 1915, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 43–44.

79. Cabanne, Siècle de Picasso, 2:449.

80. Richardson, Life, 2:429.

81. MJ to Bloch, May 14, 1915, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 145–46.

82. Cocteau’s social climbing was so egregious that Gide modeled a character on him in Les Faux-monnayeurs: Robert de Passavant (Robert Pushahead).

83. MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 26. Devotees of Max Jacob will recognize that word “situated,” which would become a key term in Jacob’s theory of the prose poem.

84. Richardson, Life, 2:282.

85. Reverdy, Voleur de Talan, 174–75.

86. MJ to Paul Bonet, cited in catalogue, Hôtel Drouot, Exposition, December 1, 1989, item 215. Reprinted as “Petit historique du Cornet à dés” in CD 15 (1967). In 1916, Jacob described Reverdy as “either a talkative Southerner or very quiet, very diplomatic, uncultured, he’s found a single note he plays in verse and prose. . . . It’s all delicate and lugubrious. My little prose poems, but sad.” MJ to Picart Le Doux, in “Montparnasse 1916 vu par Max Jacob,” Nouvelles littéraires, March 9, 1950, 5. Picasso, still jealous of Gris, consoled his old friend: “Imitators always surpass the inventors.” Peyre, Jacob quotidien, 65.

87. Reverdy, Voleur de Talan, 176.

88. Ibid., 93.

89. Pierre Reverdy, “Envie,” in Reverdy, Plupart du temps, 1915–1922 (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1969), 30.

90. Picabia loved fast cars and took several epic journeys across France with Apollinaire in 1912, including one to the Alps, where the poet is supposed to have found the title to his poem “Zone.” Gabrielle Buffet, “Apollinaire,” Transition Fifty, no. 6 (1950): 110–25. The scene is described in George Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 1–8.

91. MJ to Kahnweiler, September 22, 1914, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:98.

92. MJ to Albert Uriet, January 2, 1916, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 33.

93. Ibid.

94. MJ, “O mon ange gardien,” CD; “Il y a sur la nuit” as “Poème de la lune” in CD, in O, 375.

95. MJ, “La Vie artistique,” 291, no. 10–11 (December 1915–January 1916). As Seckel notes, a mangled version of Jacob’s piece was published by Maria Green in Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 6 (1984): 63–67, with the erroneous date February 1916. Seckel concludes, “Only a return to the manuscript and a rigorous exegesis will permit a proper account.” Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 125. The manuscript is in the Beinecke Library at Yale University (YCAL mss. 85, Box 99), along with the correspondence between Stieglitz, Picabia, and Jacob pertaining to the publication of his articles. The Yale manuscript differs in minor ways from the published version; clearly, Jacob corrected proofs. 

96. Vittorio Rieti, interview by author.

97. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 128. Léonce Rosenberg’s place would be taken, discreetly at first, by his brother Paul, who would become the principal dealer for Picasso and Braque until World War II and would make a fortune from marketing art.

98. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 121.

99. Maurice Sachs, La Décade de l’illusion (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 205. Jacob came to regret his behavior, if one can believe a letter he wrote in February 1917 to Édouard Gazanion about l’affaire Ève Picasso: “Religion taught me that I was wrong, and that’s all.” MJ, Amitiés, 1:59.

100. MJ, “La Vie artistique,” 291, no. 12 (February 1916): 4. The archives of the Beinecke Library contain the correspondence relating to these publications. Jacob was to have contributed a third article, and the file contains a tantalizing manuscript of prose poems Jacob intended for 291, which ended up in CD: “Night and Light” (the original title is in English), entitled “Aube ou crepuscule” in CD, in O, 411; “Ma vie ces dernières années,” entitled “1914” in CD and in Nord-Sud, no. 2 (April 15, 1917); “La guerre,” CD, in O, 352, and also in Nord-Sud, no. 2; and the marvelous fragment from the sequence in part 1, section four of CD, in O, 654: “L’enfant, l’éfant, l’éléphant, la grenouille et la pomme sautée,” an untranslatable game of syllables “jumping” from sense to sense, through the made-up word l’éfant, and playing on the jumping images of the frog and the sautéed “apple” or, in slang, potato (pomme de terre): “the child, the efant, the elephant, the frog and the sautéed apple.” Jacob scribbled a note on this last one: “Picabia, I beg you, leave this one out if you think it’s too banal.” Far from banal, it’s a key to Jacob’s method of derangement and rearrangement of sonic, semantic, and imagistic sense. Another draft in this file, “La Vie chrétienne,” found its place in DT as “Le ou les diables: lesquels?” (DT, in O, 498). A sign of Jacob’s complex feelings about Reverdy is his dedication of the poem “Ma vie ces dernières années” to his rival. Jacob seems to have imagined—however whimsically—founding a school of his own, “L’École de la rue Ravignan,” as all the prose poems in this manuscript are dedicated to artists or writers Jacob identifies with this “École”: “Pierre Reverdy, poète de l’école de la rue Ravignan”; “Night and Light” is dedicated to “Juan Gris, peintre de la rue Ravignan”; “La guerre” is dedicated to “Laurens, sculpteur de la rue Ravignan,” and so forth. Even while chastising Reverdy, Jacob was trying to position him as a follower.

101. MJ, “Jugement des femmes,” CD, in O, 419.

102. Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau (Boston: Atlantic–Little Brown, 1970), 182.

103. In the draft in the Beinecke, the Art Critic addresses “Ribera,” the name by which Jacob called Rivera; that name is crossed out and replaced by “Weiluc,” further complicating the delirium of claims of ownership of artistic property. Beinecke, YCAL mss. 85, Box 99.

104. CD, in O, 361.

105. MJ to Tzara, February 26, 1916, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:115–17.

106. MJ to Apollinaire, n.d. 1916, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:117–19.

107. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 137.

108. Ibid., 128.

109. Paris-Midi, through October and November 1912, reported on the Balkan uprisings against the Turks. “Lightning March of the Bulgarians upon Constantinople,” ran a headline on October 26, 1912, and the Greeks that day were reported to be sixty kilometers from Thessaloniki. On November 9, headlines announced, “Constantinople Burned and Pillaged by Kurds.” Two days later, the paper questioned, “A European War?” and described military preparations in Russia; on November 23, the paper reported that the Austrian army had mobilized. One can see the makings of world war in the autumn of 1912, as well as the conditions leading to terrible Turkish reprisals.

110. Germana Orlanda-Cerenza, “Les Alliés sont en Arménie,” in Max Jacob et la création: Colloque d’Orléans, inédits de Max Jacob, ed. Arlette Albert-Birot (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1997), 29–34.

111. “Les Alliés sont en Arménie” was reprinted as a brochure in 1976 with an introduction by Krikor Beledian. Jacob’s friendship with Altounian was deep and real, and they stayed in close touch until the Altounians moved to Macon in 1934. The dealer was a faithful collector of Jacob’s art. His collection is recorded in the catalogue Max Jacob, dessins, ed. Pleynet, Parisot, and Warnod.

112. Sylvain Laboureur, Catalogue complet de l’oeuvre de Jean-Émile Laboureur (Neufchâtel: Ides et Calendes, 1991), 3:303–4.

113. Reverdy, Voleur de Talan, 170. 

114. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 163–64.

115. Richardson, Life, 2:388.

116. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 157. Cocteau used some of these experiences in the slim novel Thomas l’imposteur (Thomas the Imposter) published by Gallimard in 1923, a confection in which war is partly a theater for bored aristocrats and phonies, partly a real hell. 

117. Billy Klüver and Julie Martin brilliantly reconstructed the sequence and calculated the exact day and times of the pictures by measuring the shadows. Klüver and Martin, Kiki’s Paris, 74–75.

118. Fillacier, Chante cigale, 377–78.

119. It’s not clear from the various accounts who read the poems. Probably not the poets themselves, as that was not generally the practice in those days, though Jacob may have read one or two. The event is described by Michel Décaudin and Étienne-Alain Hubert in “Petit historique d’une appellation,” Europe, June–July 1982, 10, 11; Cabanne, Siècle de Picasso, 2:408; and Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 128–29.

120. Richardson, Life, 2:395–405.

121. Ibid, 2:402.

122. MJ to Ghikas, July 7, 1916, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 46. MJ to Ghikas, August 1, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:57.

123. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 130.

124. Ibid., 131. Jacob also mentions the expulsion in a letter to Paulhan: MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 44.

125. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 131. In the end, Doucet bought only the manuscript of Le Siège de Jérusalem in the Matorel series, while loyally supporting Jacob with many other purchases of manuscripts of poems and commissioned chronicles. See Seckel’s account of the various manuscripts of the Matorel books and CD: Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 139n41, 149n22.

126. Ibid., 131–32.

127. MJ to Albert Uriet, December 15, 1916, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 48.

128. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Les Tendances nouvelles,” SIC, no. 8, 9, 10 (August–September 1916): 1.

129. Steegmuller, Apollinaire, 308.

130. Faure-Favier, Souvenirs, 139.

131. MJ, “La Messe du visionnaire,” DT, in O, 495. He presented a prose version in the Derain catalogue.

132. MJ to Fillacier, c. November 1916, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 47.

133. Cabanne, Siècle de Picasso, 4:464.

134. One of the brilliant fragments in CD, this poem would be used, years later, in memorials to its author. CD, in O, 366.

135. MJ, “La Vie artistique,” 291, no. 10–11 (December 1915–January 1916). No text of Dermée’s lecture survives, but Frédéric Lefèvre quoted from it the following year in a chapter hostile to Jacob and his friends in his book La Jeune poésie française: Hommes et tendances (Paris: Georges Crès & Cie, 1918), 202.

136. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 134.

137. Until recently it was thought that the series of miniature prose poems in CD following “Le Coq et la perle” (The Cock and the Pearl, incipit “I thought he was bankrupt”) all belonged under that title. It is now clear that the sequence of poems following “I thought he was bankrupt” constitute section four and do not belong to “Le Coq et la perle,” a confusion created by a printer’s error dropping the section division. Later editions removed the divisions entirely but kept the sequence of poems under the title “Le Coq et la perle.” See O, 1760n21.

138. All these poems appeared in L’Élan, no. 10 (December 1, 1916): 1. “Et quand du lancier polonais” and “Que te manque-t-il,” in CD, in O, 361; “Croient-ils donc,” in revised form in CD, in O, 367; “Le mystère est dans cette vie,” in CD, in O, 371; “Il arrive quand tu ronfles,” in CD, in O, 363. 

139. Richardson, Life, 2:401–5, for Lagut; 419–33, for Parade.

140. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 140n65. Richardson somewhat confuses the changes in the menu. Richardson, Life, 2:426.

141. Severini, Vita di un pittore, 203–5.

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1. Le Bonnet Rouge, January 13, 1917, 2.

2. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 140–41.

3. Andreu, Vie et mort, 105.

4. The old man had, however, been in Paris in January and had visited Picasso’s studio in Montrouge, where he saw the original design for the drop curtain for Parade, a harlequinesque scene with a winged horse. Richardson describes the evolution of Parade as well as Picasso’s difficult relations with the old couturier: though he did a pencil sketch of Doucet in 1915, he treated him coldly, not to say harshly. Richardson, Life, 2:304–5.

5. MJ to Jacques Doucet, January 11, 1917, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:120–23.

6. Poiret had published a piece from Cinéma Thomas, unauthorized, in his fashion journal Almanach de Martine.

7. MJ to Doucet, January 17, 1917, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:123–27.

8. MJ, “Présentation de Pierre Reverdy a ‘Lyre et Palette,’” Pierre Reverdy 1889–1960 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1962), 16–18.

9. Moricand, La Vie horrifique.

10. These marvelous letters are in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:123–40; they provide a crucial source for understanding Jacob’s attacks on realism and his ideas about aesthetic margin.

11. “Penitent Picasso has decided to enroll in the École des Beaux-Arts.” Francis Picabia, “Picasso repenti,” 391, no. 1 (January 25, 1917): 1. For Jacob’s letters to Picasso in 1917, see Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 140–48.

12. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 144.

13. MJ to Doucet, March 7, 1917, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:144.

14. MJ, “Atlantide,” 391 2, no. 3 (February 10, 1917): 23. LC, in O, 599.

15. MJ to Doucet, March 22, 1917, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:145–46. MJ to Picasso, in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 144.

16. MJ, “La guerre se prolonge . . . ,” Nord-Sud, no. 1 (March 15, 1917): 2; reprinted in Nord-Sud, Revue Littéraire 1917–1918 (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1980).

17. Pierre Reverdy, “Sur le Cubisme,” Nord-Sud, no. 1 (March 15, 1917): 6. See also Pierre Reverdy, “Essai d’esthétique littéraire,” Nord-Sud, no. 4–5 (June–July 1917): 4–6. The idea of a realism that is not mimetic is central to most accounts of Modernist art. For a philosophical slant on the subject, see Robert Pippin, After the Beautiful (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 11n13.

18. On March 22, he wrote Doucet with a clear sense of involvement in the journal (Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:145–46); the same day, he wrote Picasso that Nord-Sud was “poor and pale” (Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 144). On March 31, he judged the simplicity of its appearance “excessive” (Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 145); on April 11, he assured Doucet that Nord-Sud was doing well and would survive (Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:146, 149, 151).

19. MJ, “Poème,” Nord-Sud, no. 1 (March 15, 1917): 12. LC, in O, 581. The three-line epigraph “Comme un bateau” is presented as a prose poem in CD, in O, 368.

20. MJ, “Histoire de Don Juan,” Nord-Sud, no. 1 (March 15, 1917): 13; Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 144.

21. In France, Jacob’s friend Michel Leiris would publish one of the most important studies on the relation of sacred and profane, Le Sacré dans la vie quotidienne, ed. Denis Hollier (Paris: Éditions Allia, 2016). MJ, “La Messe du démoniaque,” DT, in O, 510. See the subtle analysis of this poem in Alexander Dickow, Le poète innombrable (Paris: Hermann, 2015), 32–35.

22. MJ, “La Guerre” and “1914,” Nord-Sud, no. 2 (April 15, 1917): 11; CD, in O, 351–52. Another of Jacob’s war poems appeared in the May issue of Nord-Sud; also entitled “1914,” it most directly reflects the poet’s fear: “His jutting belly wears a restraining corset. His plumed hat is squashed; his face is a terrifying death’s head, but brown and so ferocious one expects to see a rhinoceros horn or extra fang in his awful maxillary. O sinister vision of German death.” MJ, “1914,” Nord-Sud, no. 3 (May 15, 1917): 8; CD, in O, 352.

23. MJ, “Note sur la vie de Rosalie Fromager, Femme Gaëtan,” Nord-Sud, no. 2 (April 15, 1917): 12–15; RB, in O, 875.

24. Pierre Reverdy, “Entre autres choses,” Nord-Sud, no. 2 (April 15, 1917): 15.

25. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 145.

26. “I composed, Satie modestly said, a background for certain noises that the librettist believes essential to the creation of the atmosphere for his characters. Satie exaggerates, but the noise in fact played a great role in Parade. Material difficulties (absence of compressed air among others) deprived us of these effects of trompe-l’oreille—dynamo—Morse code—sirens—express train—airplanes—that I used like the newspapers, frames, imitation wood, the painters use to simulate similar transfigurations.” Jean Cocteau, “La Collaboration de Parade,” Nord-Sud, no. 4–5 (June–July 1917): 29–31. For an acerbic account of Picasso’s and Satie’s struggles with Cocteau, see Richardson, Life, 2:419–24. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 188, presents a more sympathetic version.

27. For the text of the note, see Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 145. For an account of the conflict of Picasso’s dinners, see Richardson, Life, 3:44.

28. “Le 24 juin, 1917,” SIC, June 1917, n.p. “Extraits de presse concernant la representation des Mamelles de Tirésias le 24 juin 1917,” SIC, July–August 1917, n.p. Aragon reviewed the play enthusiastically in SIC, March 1918.

29. “Les Mamelles de Tirésias,” Nord-Sud, no. 4–5 (June–July 1917): 3. Unsigned, but authored by Max Jacob: the draft in his handwriting is in the Doucet collection.

30. Guillory de Saix, in La France, June 29, 1917, quoted in SIC, July–August 1917, n.p.

31. For Apollinaire, “surrealist” simply meant a rejection of the realism that dominated most drama of his day, and the more radical “realism” that Cocteau had claimed for Parade. In the hands of André Breton a few years later, it would describe a new revolutionary aesthetic philosophy and practice. The young Breton befriended Apollinaire in his last year and even claimed to have helped him with the preface to Les Mamelles and the formulation of the word “surrealist.” Henri Béhar, André Breton: Le grand indésirable (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1990), 52. In 1922, Breton described his own use of the word for the movement he founded two years later: “My friends and I know, up to a certain point, what we mean by surrealism. This word, which we didn’t invent and which we could just as well have abandoned to the vaguest critical vocabulary, we use in a precise sense. By it, we have agreed to designate a certain psychic automatism.” Littérature 2, no. 6 (November 1922): 1, 2.

32. Gabory, Apollinaire, 13–19.

33. The Reverdys stayed for several weeks with Braque and his wife in Sorgues and then found lodgings of their own a few kilometers away. Braque was recovering from his head wound and finding his way back into his painting. Reverdy, Voleur de Talan, 177.

34. The chronicle is unsigned, but the draft in Jacob’s handwriting is in RDY 386, BLJD. The chronicler makes it clear that he’s filling in for the editor: “If I’m mistaken, or if someone misled me, errata will be published in the next issue. In short, these gentlemen can jolly well not take vacations. Do I take them? When the cat’s away, the mice will play.” “Chronique mensuelle,” Nord-Sud, no. 4–5 (June–July 1917): 2–3.

35. “Conférence Guillaume Apollinaire,” Nord-Sud, no. 4–5 (June–July 1917): 3.

36. MJ to Doucet, August 4, 1915, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:155.

37. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 159n76; Richardson, Life, 2:426–27.

38. MJ, “Périgal-Nohor,” Nord-Sud, no. 4–5 (June–July 1917): 19; LC, in O, 590. The final couplet, as Gabory recognized when he read the poem in Nord-Sud, twisted lines from verses in Alexandre Dumas’s novel from 1845, La Reine Margot. Gabory, Apollinaire, 22. The lines from Dumas read: “Tous deux également nous portons des couronnes. / Mais roi, je la reçus, poète, tu les donnes” (The two of us equally wear crowns. / But as a king, I received mine; as a poet, you give them). 

39. MJ to Doucet asking for help for the soldier, August 27, 1917, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:160–61. MJ to Level, n.d., in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:162–63.

40. Richardson, Life, 2:396.

41. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 152n88.

42. MJ to Hertz, August 27, 1917, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:60–61.

43. MJ to Cocteau, November 9, 1917, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 37.

44. Renée Gros’s professional name was René Jean. MJ to Doucet, August 27, 1917, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:161. 

45. MJ to Roland-Manuel, September 17, 1917, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:163–66. Jacob often addressed him as Roland.

46. MJ to Roland-Manuel, c. early 1918, in ibid., 1:167.

47. Anne Kimball quotes from a letter Maurice Raynal wrote Paulhan about Jacob’s promise to pray for him: “Max Jacob prays for me too, it’s a refrain he serves to anyone and everyone. Even if it were true I doubt the efficacy of his interventions with heaven; and then in that case I’d pray for myself.” MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 56n4.

48. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 147.

49. Gabory, Apollinaire, 26.

50. See O, 344, for discussion of the printer’s error by which later editions lost those divisions.

51. Reverdy, Voleur de Talan, 180; Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 152n92.

52. MJ, “Avis,” CD, in O, 351.

53. “Attention aux fausses nouvelles,” Paris-Journal, July 31, 1914.

54. MJ, “Poème,” originally entitled “Poème en forme de peloton de fil embrouillé.” CD, in O, 359. The best translation I know for phare à boeufs is by Christopher Pilling and David Kennedy: “the bull’s-eye beacon.” Christopher Pilling and David Kennedy, The Dice Cup (London: Atlas, 2000), 26.

55. Hastings published her translation of this poem in New Age, February 18, 1915, 432.

56. “Poème simultané avec superposition simple” became simply “Poème” in later editions: O, 357, incipit “Que veux-tu de moi . . .” “Poème simultané avec deux rouleaux” also became “Poème”: O, 357, incipit “Effacer les têtes . . .”

57. Hastings published this one in New Age, February 18, 1915, 431. CD, in O, 362.

58. MJ, “Poème dans un goût qui n’est pas le mien,” CD, in O, 353, 355.

59. MJ, “Sir Elisabeth (Prononcez Soeur),” CD, in O, 390; MJ, “L’Âme de la Joconde,” CD, in O, 393; MJ, “Roman d’aventures,” CD, in O, 393; and the frankly hermaphroditic MJ, “Ruses du demon pour ravoir sa proie,” CD, in O, 420.

60. CD, in O, 371.

61. Ibid., 363.

62. The preface of 1906, printed only in the first edition of CD, reads, “There is nothing in common between the prose poem and Rimbaud’s exaltations. Rimbaud’s oeuvre boasted of its sublime disorder; the prose poem balances the elements of which it is composed. Rimbaud’s imitators are perhaps poets in prose; they are not the authors of prose poems.” Though dated 1906, it’s likely that Jacob wrote this angry paragraph aimed at Reverdy only after the appearance of Reverdy’s Poèmes en prose in 1915.

63. CD, in O, 347.

64. Ibid., 348.

65. Ibid., 349.

66. Ibid.

67. Louis de Gonzague Frick, “M. Max Jacob et son Cornet à dés,” SIC, no. 24 (December 1917): n.p.

68. Lefèvre, Jeune poésie, 198.

69. Ibid., 200.

70. Ibid., 241–52.

71. Pierre Reverdy, “Un Livre!,” Nord-Sud, no. 10 (December 1917): 2.

72. Reverdy, Voleur de Talan, 180. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 152n92.

73. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 155, 165n20.

74. MJ to Roland-Manuel, c. early 1918, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:167–68.

75. Gabory, Apollinaire, 28.

76. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 160, 166n60.

77. Ibid., 161. See the biography of Michel Leiris for details of Roland-Manuel’s father-in-law: Aliette Armel, Michel Leiris (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 148–49.

78. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 160. For the dispute, see “Examen de conscience fait sur l’humilité,” DT, in O, 504. For Lévi, see Roland Lardinois and Georges Weill, Sylvain Lévi: Le savant et le citoyen (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010), 123.

79. MJ to Paulhan, April 16, 1918, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 66.

80. MJ to Bloch, March 19, 1918, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 148–49.

81. Henri Vandeputte, “Le Cornet à dés,” Carnet critique (February 19, 1917–November 15, 1918), cited in Victor Martin-Schmets, “L’Amitié de Max Jacob et de Henri Vandeputte,” in Max Jacob à la confluence: Actes du colloque de Quimper (Quimper: Bibliothèque Municipale, 2000), 109–10.

82. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 164n9. 

83. Louis Aragon, “Les Ardoises du Toit,” SIC, May 1918, n.p.

84. Pierre Reverdy, 118 Lettres inédites (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1976), 47. Reverdy’s critique of Apollinaire’s self-review: “Chroniques,” Nord-Sud, no. 15 (May 15, 1918): n.p. The issue came out only in August 1918. Reverdy returned the favor by reviewing his own Ardoises du Toit in this same chronicle under the pseudonym S. Laforêt, another “woody” name to echo “Jolibois.”

85. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 157–58.

86. There seems to be uncertainty about its origin. Seckel says it was founded in 1917 by Paul Lafitte with Cendrars as advisor (Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 167n99). Miriam Cendrars agrees: she claims it was founded by Paul Lafitte, a banker, who invited Cendrars and then Cocteau to be “literary advisers.” Miriam Cendrars, Blaise Cendrars: La vie, le verbe, l’écriture (Paris: Denoël, 1993), 359. Anne Kimball, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 40, says it was founded in 1918 by Cocteau, Cendrars, and Jacques Lafitte.

87. MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 71.

88. Cocteau to MJ, November 15, 1918, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 39.

89. CTH, 76.

90. MJ to René Fauchois, November 12, 1918, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:177.

91. Jean-Pierre Goldenstein, “Gaston Picard, le prince des enquêteurs,” Études littéraires 5, no. 2 (August 1972): 317.

92. Salmon, Jacob, poète, 15; Moricand, La Vie horrifique.

93. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 164.

94. CTH, 20–21.

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1. Gabory, Apollinaire, 22.

2. Ibid., 26.

3. Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto,” in Caws, Manifesto, 297–304.

4. Adrienne Monnier, The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Scribners, 1977), 88.

5. Aragon, Anicet, 133.

6. Breton broke with Tzara in February 1922 when Tzara undermined Breton’s attempt to organize the various avant-gardes in a “Congress of Paris.” Tzara’s mischievous anarchism collided with Breton’s authoritarianism, and the congress exploded in the planning stages with Breton attacking Tzara in xenophobic terms, “a publicity-mongering imposter . . . a person known as the promoter of a ‘movement’ that comes from Zurich, whom it is pointless to name more specifically, and who no longer corresponds to any reality.” Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), 170. See also Henri Béhar, André Breton: Le grand indésirable (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1990), 127, and the excellent account in Michel Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, trans. Sharmila Ganguli (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 233–53.

7. Aragon, Anicet, 103.

8. Ibid., 106.

9. Gabory, Apollinaire, 26, 54.

10. Ibid., 55.

11. Béhar, Breton, 73.

12. Ibid., 74.

13. Pierre Reverdy, “Les Jockeys mécaniques” and “Autres jockeys alcooliques.” See Andrew Rothwell, “Reverdy’s Les Jockeys camouflés: From Aesthetic Polemic to ‘art poétique,’” Nottingham French Studies 28, no. 2 (Autumn 1989): 26–44.

14. Béhar, Breton, 64.

15. Pierre Reverdy, “Trente-deux lettres inédites à André Breton, 1917–1924,” ed. Léon Somville, Études littéraires (Québec) 3, no. 1 (April 1970): 97–120.

16. MJ, “La Rue Ravignan,” Littérature 1, no. 1 (March 1919): 15. LC, in O, 585.

17. Littérature 1, no. 1 (March 1919): 24.

18. Gabory, Apollinaire, 56.

19. Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:183. In a letter dated February 5, 1919, “probably” to Radiguet, Jacob addresses him formally and compliments him on his poems.

20. Béalu, Dernier visage, 56. For the meeting of Cocteau and Radiguet, see Steegmuller, Cocteau, 248–49.

21. Radiguet’s cruelty struck many observers; see Steegmuller, Cocteau, 249. One can also imagine the confusions of an adolescent involved romantically with an older woman. The story of Alice and Radiguet is told in Nadia Odouart, Les années folles de Raymond Radiguet (Paris: Seghers, 1973), 34–54. 

22. Gabory, Apollinaire, 26. Doric refers to Gide’s distinction between Greek Doric and Ionic art, made in conversation with the novelist Roger Martin du Gard. See Roger Martin du Gard, Notes sur André Gide (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 104. Ancient Greece was itself code for homosexuality. 

23. Gabory, Apollinaire, 37.

24. Ibid., 42–43.

25. P came out in mid-December, the luxury edition distinguished by Picasso’s etching of a harlequin in a whimsical commedia dell’arte style, a portrait of the choreographer Léonid Massine. Jacob had dug this manuscript from 1906 out of his trunk; though Aragon noticed it in a short review in SIC, it wouldn't attract much attention and would soon be eclipsed by Jacob’s more contemporary books, DT and C.

26. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 168.

27. Richardson, Life, 3:111.

28. MJ to Doucet, April 26, 1919, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:189.

29. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 171n9.

30. MJ to Cocteau, c. November 1919, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 41.

31. Jean Cocteau, Carte blanche (Paris: Éditions de La Sirène, 1920), 8, 9.

32. Raymond Lulle, Le Livre de l’ami et de l’aimé, trans. Antonio de Barrau and MJ (Paris: Éditions de La Sirène, 1920), 6.

33. Ibid., 30.

34. MJ, “Colloque III,” FE, in O, 1413.

35. MJ, “Le Christ à Montparnasse,” Écrits Nouveaux 3, no. 16–17 (April–May 1919): 70–88.

36. Gabory, Apollinaire, 44–45.

37. As he would so often, Jacob here claimed his birth date as July 11, whereas it was the 12; he stated that he started using ether only a year after the apparition. 

38. MJ, “Le Christ à Montparnasse,” 70.

39. Ibid., 71.

40. Ibid., 82. All of these passages were retained in DT.

41. MJ, “L’Eucharistie,” DT, in O, 497; MJ, “Le Christ au Cinématographe,” DT, in O, 488.

42. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 170.

43. Cocteau, Carte blanche, 86–92.

44. MJ to Emma Hertz, May 26, 1919, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 62. Bertin would direct a number of Jacob’s plays. He joined the Comédie-Française in 1923, and later, as a member of the Madeleine Renaud–Jean-Louis Barrault Company he acted in Cocteau’s play Oedipus the King and in Cocteau’s film Orphée.

45. For Jacob's fulsome appreciation, see his letter of May 1919, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 44.

46. Cocteau, Carte blanche, 70–74.

47. Ibid., 80; Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 170. Bertin put on the play again on July 12 with another actor playing the role of the headmaster.

48. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 170.

49. MJ, “La Mort morale,” CD, in O, 401; MJ, “Mort morale,” Littérature, no. 4 (June 1919): 4; LC, in O, 572.

50. MJ, “Autres personnages du bal masqué,” Littérature, no. 6 (August 1919): 4; LC, in O, 625. It formed one of a group about the Masked Ball, Jacob’s allegory for social life, mostly composed in 1913 and published in Les Soirées de Paris. Poulenc set three of Jacob’s “Bal Masqué” poems to music along with another poem from LC: “Malvina,” “La Dame aveugle,” and “Autres personnages du bal masqué,” with “Madame la Dauphine”: O, 603, 624–25.

51. “Lettres de Jacques Vaché,” Littérature, no. 6 (August 1919): 10–16.

52. MJ to Cocteau, January 1920, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 53. Jacob asked the editors at Littérature to publish his letter defending Cocteau. Breton never did publish the letter, which arrived just as Littérature took its radical turn and (for a while) joined Dada.

53. Salmon, Manuscrit. See Chapter 5 for Salmon’s description of the Bateau Lavoir.

54. Francis Carco, Scènes de la vie de Montmartre (Paris: Fayard, 1919), 54.

55. Louis Aragon, “Francis Carco: Scènes de la vie de Montmartre,” Littérature, no. 9 (November 1919): 27.

56. MJ to Carco, April 5, 1919, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:186. Jacob would be still more disgusted by Carco’s accounts of Bohemia in his memoir De Montmartre au Quartier Latin in 1927, writing to Sylvette Fillacier that the book was full of lies and horrors. Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 283.

57. MJ to Carco, April 22, 1919, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:188.

58. Liane de Pougy, Mes cahiers bleus (Paris: Plon, 1977), 36.

59. Ibid., 46.

60. MJ to Cocteau, September 4, 1919, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 46.

61. Back in Paris September 10: MJ, Amitiés, 1:66. Visit to Ghikas: Pougy, Mes cahiers, 71.

62. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 170–71.

63. The word tartufe spelled with one f, meaning “hypocrite,” seems to have entered the French language in the seventeenth century. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française of 1697 claims that it was a recent coinage. Molière’s play dates to 1664.

64. DT, in O, 517.

65. MJ, “Plaintes d’un prisonnier,” LC, in O, 592.

66. Tristan Tzara, “Noblesse galvanisée,” Littérature, no. 8 (October 1919): 11.

67. André Breton and Philippe Soupault, “Les Champs magnétiques,” Littérature, no. 8 (October 1919).

68. MJ to Cocteau, c. January 1920, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 53.

69. The classic account of the matinée is in Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 102–5.

70. Paul Éluard and Jean Paulhan, Correspondance 1919–1944 (Paris: Éditions Claire Paulhan, 2003), 78.

71. MJ to Michael Manoll, January 9, 1943, in MJ, Lettres à Michel Manoll, ed. Maria Green (Paris: Rougerie, 1985), 123.

72. MJ, “À Monsieur Modigliani pour lui prouver que je suis un poète,” LC, in O, 568. On the draft of another poem addressed to Modigliani in the manuscript “Le Christ à Montparnasse,” Jacob has scrawled, “I don’t want this to be published.” 

73. As Jacob later recalled the scene, when Guillaume asked to see Modi’s paintings, Jacob whispered, “Say yes.” When Modigliani, who was only making sculpture at that point, protested, Jacob instructed: “Just draw on the canvas and fill in the spaces with color.” This story is recounted by André Peyre from an interview with the painter Roger Toulouse, who knew Jacob in his last years; Peyre’s book is full of errors, and the story itself may be apocryphal. It is the case that Jacob introduced Modigliani to Guillaume in 1914, and that Guillaume encouraged Modi to paint. Peyre, Jacob quotidien, 93–94.

74. The portrait from 1916 is in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westphalen collection in Düsseldorf; the portrait from 1920 is in the Cincinnati Art Museum.

75. Jacques Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani 1884–1920 (New York: Abrams, 1954), 1–5. Salmon later wrote a dreadful, chatty, exploitative book about Modigiliani, La Vie passionnée de Modigliani (Verviers, Belgium: Éditions Gérard, 1957).

76. In his account in “Nuits d’hôpital et l’aurore” in RB, Jacob gives the date as January 27, but as Seckel points out, it must have been January 31, since he specified that he attended the second performance. RB, in O, 945; Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 173.

77. MJ, “Nuits d’hôpital et l’aurore,” RB, in O, 944.

78. Ibid., 942–43.

79. Quoted by Florent Fels, who observed the exchange. Florent Fels, L’Art vivant de 1900 à nos jours (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1956), 29.

80. Pougy, Mes cahiers, 98.

81. Ibid.

82. Ibid., 103.

83. Henri Ghéon, “La Défense de Tartufe, par Max Jacob,” Nouvelle Revue française, no. 78 (March 1920): 452.

84. Frédéric Lefèvre, “Une heure avec M. Max Jacob, poète, romancier, et humoriste,” Nouvelles littéraires, April 12, 1924, 1–2.

85. MJ, “Théâtre et Cinéma,” Nord-Sud, no. 18 (February 1918): n.p.

86. Saul Bellow would take note and spoke to me of his admiration of Jacob. For an extended discussion of CI, see Chapter 8.

87. Roger Allard, “Cinématoma, par Max Jacob,” Nouvelle Revue française 7, no. 83 (August 1920): 327.

88. Jean de Gourmont, “Le Cinématoma,” Mercure de France 31, no. 141 (July–August 1920): 182.

89. Louis Aragon, “Max Jacob, Cinématoma,” Littérature 2, no. 14 (June 1920): 29.

90. Feu de joie (Fire of Joy). In spite of his Modernist lineation, Aragon maintained a rather saccharine Romanticism: “Je danse au miliu des miracles / Mille soleils peints sur le sol . . .” (I dance among miracles / A thousand suns painted on the ground . . . ): Louis Aragon, “Parti-pris,” Le Mouvement perpetuel (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 42.

91. For Fels, see Gabory, Apollinaire, 74–81, and MJ, Lettres à Florent Fels, ed. Maria Green (Mortemart: Rougerie, 1990).

92. MJ, “Le Damasquineur,” “Plus d’astrologie,” “Don Quichotte voyage en mer,” “Allusions romantiques à propos de Mardi-Gras,” Action 1, no. 2 (March 1920): 24–28. MJ, “Plus d’astrologie,” LC, in O, 587; MJ, “Allusions romantiques à propos de Mardi-Gras,” LC, in O, 595.

93. MJ, “Allusions romantiques au Mardi-Gras,” Action 1, no. 2 (March 1920). LC, in O, 595.

94. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 174–76.

95. MJ, “Présentation de l’auteur par lui-même,” n.p.

96. André Salmon, “Un peintre nouveau, Max Jacob,” Renaissance de l’art français de des industries de luxe, no. 3 (March 1920): 119–27.

97. Pougy, Mes cahiers, 215.

98. Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:209–17.

99. MJ to Salmon, April 14, 1920, ibid., 1:210.

100. MJ to Roland-Manuel, April 1920, ibid., 1:215.

101. O, 829.

102. Jacques Rivière didn’t like the first story Jacob sent for the journal, nor did he like the first batch of poems; it would take some months for Jacob’s work to find its way into the pages of the Nouvelle Revue française. The book RB would appear from the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1921. MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 78–79.

103. Georges Auric, Quand j’étais là (Paris: Grasset, 1979).

104. MJ to Salmon, February 15, 1920, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 1:205.

105. André Salmon, La Négresse du Sacré-Coeur (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1920), 14.

106. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 176.

107. Guillaume Apollinaire, La Femme assise (1920; reprint Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 27–28.

108. Jacques Rivière, “La Revue critique,” Nouvelle Revue française 6, no. 72 (September 1919): 636.

109. André Gide, “Dada,” Nouvelle Revue française 7, no. 79 (April 1920): 477. Tzara was Jewish; his legal name was Samy Rosenstock.

110. Ibid., 479.

111. Ibid., 481.

112. André Breton, “Pour Dada,” Nouvelle Revue française 7, no. 83 (August 1920): 208–15; Jacques Rivière, “Reconnaissance à Dada,” ibid., 216–37.

113. MJ, “Ma Vie en trois lignes,” Action 1, no. 4 (July 1920): 23; reprinted by Éluard in “Revue des revues,” Littérature 2, no. 15 (July–August 1920): 23. The other prose poems in the group seem equally topical, which probably explains why Jacob chose to place only one in a volume: “Jamais Plus” (Nevermore), the most obviously Catholic, came out in VI in 1924, in O, 658.

114. Pierre Reverdy, “L’Ami de l’homme ou parasite,” Littérature 2, no. 16 (September–October 1920): 1.

115. Pierre Reverdy, “Le Vieil apprenti,” ibid., 2.

116. It’s strange that Reverdy reprinted these three vicious poems in Flaques de verre in 1929. By that time, he had long reestablished his friendship with Jacob; he had converted to Catholicism with Jacob as his godfather, and in 1924 Jacob dedicated his collection VI to “Pierre Reverdy, my friend.” Old grudges, it seems, cannot easily be erased.

117. Jean Cocteau, Poésies 1917–1920 (Paris: Éditions de La Sirène, 1920), 8.

118. MJ to Cocteau, July 4, 1920, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 56–57. Jacob extracted key sentences from this letter for his treatise on esthetics, AP, in O, 1373.

119. MJ to Cocteau, July 4, 1920, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 58.

120. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 257.

121. MJ, “Nocturne,” Le Coq parisien, no. 3 (July–August 1920): n.p. LC, in O, 564.

122. MJ to Bloch, c. late 1920, in “Lettres à Bloch, 2e partie,” 151.

123. MJ to Paulhan, August 3, 1920, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 79.

124. Gabory, Apollinaire, 91–92.

125. MJ to Paulhan, August 1920, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 81.

126. Pougy, Mes cahiers, 131–32.

127. MJ to Kisling, September 28, 1920, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 77.

128. MJ, “Bonnes intentions,” Nouvelle Revue française 8, no. 85 (October 1920): 489–95. RB, in O, 903.

129. Louis Aragon, “Y a-t-il des gens qui s’amusent dans la vie?,” Littérature 2, no. 17 (December 1920): 3.

130. MJ, Lettres à Togorès, intr. Hélène Henry, ed. Josep Casamartina (Terrassa, Spain: Fundació La Mirada, 1998), 26. Jacob wrote to Salmon in January 1921 to tell him the good news: Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 84.

131. Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 84.

132. MJ to Paul Budry, early 1921, ibid., 90.

133. MJ to Radiguet, October 22, 1920, ibid., 78–79.

134. Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 165–67; Steegmuller, Cocteau, 260–61; Auric, Quand j’étais là, 173–74.

135. Pougy, Mes cahiers, 142.

136. MJ to Salmon, January 1921, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 84. The dedication as finally published read: “To André Salmon, poet and precursor of the modern poets, my admired and respected friend.”

137. MJ, Ne coupez pas, Mademoiselle (Paris: Éditions de la Galerie Simon, 1921), n.p.

138. Pougy, Mes cahiers, 153; Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 177n10. To put things in perspective: one of Jacob’s paintings had recently sold for 640 francs, and he had earned 3000 from his whole show at Bernheim-Jeune. One could live frugally in Paris on 600 francs a month; on the other hand, a box at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to see Le Boeuf sur le toit cost 500 francs.

139. Pougy, Mes cahiers, 152.

140. Georges Hugnet, Pleins et déliés: Souvenirs et témoignages (Paris: Guy Authier, 1972), 177.

141. “Liquidation,” Littérature 3, no. 18 (March 1921): 1–7.

142. Béhar, Breton, 123.

143. Pougy, Mes cahiers, 150–51. Caryathis was the stage name of Elisabeth Toulemon, a popular dancer in cabarets and ballet and a friend of Cocteau, Étienne de Beaumont, Satie, Auric, and Poulenc. On this occasion, Jacob had apparently worn a woman’s white Arabian dress belonging to Lucien Daudet, and he had left it at her house; he wrote the next morning asking her if he could come by and pick it up. MJ, Lettres à Marcel Jouhandeau, 45.

144. Armel, Michel Leiris, 148. See Chapter 6 for more on Roland-Manuel and the corrupt father-in-law.

145. MJ, “L’Explorateur,” LC, in O, 575.

146. MJ, “Musique Acidulée,” LC, in O, 606.

147. MJ to Cocteau, March 29, mid-April, and June 10, 1921, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 64–67.

148. Guiette, Vie, 93–94; Andreu, Vie et mort, 136–40.

149. MJ, “Lettres avec commentaires,” Nouvelle Revue française, no. 91 (April 1921): 385–400, in O, 971–78, 994–99. In the remarkable fecundity of these years, Jacob was preparing yet another book: the stories would go into the collection CN (The Dark Room) in 1922. The titles of the individual stories are “Ils en ont ri ensemble au café” (They Laughed Together about It at the Café); “À Propos du Baccalauréat” (About the Baccalaureat Exam); and “Deux lettres écrites à quinze ans d’intervalle” (Two Letters Written Fifteen Years Apart).

150. MJ, “Contes de fées,” Action 2, no. 7 (May 1921): 13–18. MJ, “Étude Romanesque,” Signaux de France et de Belgique (June 1921): 59–72, in O, 955–64. In the spring of 1921, he also brought out Matorel en province, the erstwhile prologue for TB, now a freestanding chapbook from Vogel, and from the Éditions de Sagittaire, Dos d’Arlequin, three of his opéra bouffe playlets with his own sprightly drawings of eighteenth-century dancers.

151. Assouline, L’homme de l’art, 321–29.

152. Reverdy described to Stanislas Fumet how Jacob’s enactment of the Passion inspired him. Christine Andreucci, “L’Amitié entre Pierre Reverdy et Max Jacob,” Centenaire de Pierre Reverdy (Angers: Presse de l’Université d’Angers, 1990), 287. To Maurice Sachs, Jacob later wrote of Reverdy: “He’s taking, has taken, and will take my place even at Solesmes (I mean: in religion): it’s his system.” Bibliothèque Municipale d’Orléans, ms. 2249. Stanislas Fumet, “Histoire d'une amitié,” in Pierre Reverdy 1889–1960 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1962), 319–20; Centenaire de Pierre Reverdy, 376; Alice Halicka, Hier, souvenirs (Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1946), 75.

153. Armel, Michel Leiris, 148–49.

154. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 181.

155. Theodore Reff, “Picasso’s Three Musicians: Maskers, Artists, and Friends,” Art in America, December 1980, 124–42; Richardson, Life, 3:197–99; Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 180–84.

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1. MJ to Marcoussis, August 13, 1921, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:26.

2. MJ to Kahnweiler, c. June 1921, ibid., 2:15. In these first months at Saint-Benoît, Jacob described his surroundings to many friends. Letters to Roland-Manuel, Kahnweiler, Marcoussis, Salmon, and Kisling can be found in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, vol. 2. He also wrote the Ghikas (see MJ and Salomon Reinach, Lettres à Liane de Pougy [Paris: Plon, 1980], 22–31) and Cocteau (see MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 68). His letters to the art dealer André Level are partly in the BLJD and partly in the Bibliothèque Municipale de Quimper and have been published in MJ, Lettres à André Level, ed. Bernard Duchatelet (Quimper: Bibliothèque Municipale, 1994). The letters to his Breton friends Monsieur and Madame Marcel Neveu are in the Bibliothèque Nationale (n. acq. fr. 16799, BnF).

3. The relics were transported to Saint-Benoît from Saint Benedict’s monastery on Monte Cassino in Italy to save them from the depredations of the Goths, sometime between 657 and 679. See notes by Fr. Jean Evenou in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 516. For the finances of his room and board, see MJ, Amitiés, 1:82. 

4. MJ to the Ghikas, June 25, 1921, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 23.

5. MJ to Roland-Manuel, August 5, 1921, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:2.

6. MJ to Kahnweiler, c. June 1921, ibid., 2:15; MJ to Roland-Manuel, November 18, 1921, ibid., 2:46.

7. MJ to Marcoussis, August 13, 1921, ibid., 2:26.

8. MJ to Salmon, August 18, 1921, ibid., 2:31; MJ to Roland-Manuel, August 5, 1921, ibid., 2:20.

9. For the portrait of Breut, see Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:14. Théophile Briant, “Itinéraires de Max Jacob,” Goéland, August 1946.

10. MJ to Pougy, September 23, 1921, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 28.

11. MJ to Cocteau, July 8, 1921, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 68–69.

12. MJ to Georges Ghika, August 11, 1921, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 104. 

13. Each publisher had been sending him 500 francs a month. Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 105; MJ, Amitiés, 1:82. His friend Nino Frank described his misunderstandings with his publishers. Nino Frank, Mémoire brisée (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1967), 141.

14. MJ to Neveu, September 28, 1921, in n. acq. fr. 16799, BnF.

15. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 188n37. Nino Frank described the family in Mémoire, 134–35. Also present during Frank’s visit was Gabriel Guernolé, the “Captain’s” wife’s brother, a retired army man and cook on transatlantic ships. 

16. Descriptions of the monastery, see MJ to Salmon, September 15, 1921, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:42; MJ to Roland-Manuel, September 5, 1921, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:37; MJ to Gabory, July 28, 1921, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:83. He kept his room on the Rue Gabrielle until 1923, using it for his occasional visits to Paris. Nino Frank described the succulent meals prepared by the Abbé’s mother. Frank, Mémoire, 134.

17. MJ, “Voyages,” Action (March–April 1922); PMR, in O, 674.

18. MJ to Roland-Manuel, September 5, 1921, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:37.

19. Ibid., 2:38.

20. MJ to Salmon, September 15, 1921, ibid., 2:43. Roland Moufflet would become a professor in the Catholic school of Sainte Croix in Orléans, where Jacob’s sponsor the Abbé Weill taught. Moufflet later taught at the Collège Saint Gervais in Pithiviers and in 1946 became a parish priest, all the while pursuing his studies of archaeology. Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 109n1.

21. MJ to Henri and Emma Hertz, September 29, 1921, Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 110.

22. Details of the transaction emerge in letters to Kisling on August 4, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 101; August 16, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:29; September 12, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:89; and to Gabory, July 28, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:82.

23. MJ to Paulhan, September 15, 1921, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 92.

24. André Fontainas, “Le Laboratoire central,” Mercure de France, no. 149 (August 1921): 739–40.

25. Henri Ther, “Livres,” Aventure, no. 1 (November 1921): 31–32.

26. Roger Allard, “Le Laboratoire central” and “Dos d’Arlequin, par Max Jacob” Nouvelle Revue française, no. 99 (December 1921): 743–46.

27. MJ, “Art poétique,” Écrits Nouveaux 8 (July 1921): 3–8, in O, 1373. 

28. O, 1374.

29. O, 1373.

30. O, 1377.

31. O, 1379. The editors of the Oeuvres complètes of Raymond Radiguet claim that Radiguet wrote AP with Jacob. There are no grounds for such an assertion, and Radiguet never claimed it. Antonio Rodriguez, the editor of the O of Max Jacob, has examined the original manuscript of AP and found just one maxim attributed to Radiguet: “Insignificance is the vice of bad poems in the new spirit, but significance doesn’t indicate the presence of an idea,” on O, 1352. See Rodriguez’s discussion of the evidence, O, 1344–45.

32. André Salmon, “Gazette de l’Étoile,” Action 2, no. 9 (October 1921): 11.

33. MJ, “Ennui sur le taureau d’Europe,” Action 2, no. 9 (October 1921): 18. Corrected version in PMR, in O, 679. Jacob removed lines seven and eight in PMR, letting the poem move more swiftly to its main concern, “Is there a corner of solitude?” In a letter to Radiguet, October 1921, Jacob wrote that “Peste” was a misprint for “Perse,” so the exclamation “Oh! Plagues!” would become “Oh! Persia!” Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 116.

34. MJ, “Lettres avec commentaires,” Action 2, no. 10 (November 1921): 1–6; CN, in O, 1032–36. Jacob did not include these two stories in the first edition of CN in 1922; they appeared only in the enlarged edition in 1928. “Lettre de 1920” in the book omitted the original commentary.

35. Leiris would turn out to be one of the most significant writers of twentieth-century France, renowned for his volumes of autobiographical reflection as well as for his separate work as an ethnographer. The details of his hostility to his father come from his early book, L’Âge d’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), 89–90.

36. Ibid., 10.

37. Ibid., 157.

38. MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 31.

39. Armel, Michel Leiris, 141.

40. MJ to Leiris, November 24, 1921, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 33–35.

41. Ibid., 35.

42. Ibid., 34–35.

43. MJ to Leiris, December 6, 1921, ibid., 37–40.

44. Ibid., 40.

45. MJ to Leiris, February 7, 1922, ibid., 51.

46. Their son, Robert, born in 1909, was mentally handicapped and would eventually reside in the psychiatric hospital of Villejuif, where he escaped the notice of the Nazis and was thus one of the only members of the Jacob family to survive the Holocaust, dying in 1980.

47. MJ to Rosenthal, June 3, 1921, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les propos et les jours, 93.

48. MJ to Rosenthal, July 23, 1923, ibid., 97. “The genre of mad genius was used up sixty years ago.”

49. MJ to Rosenthal, September 2, 1921, ibid., 106.

50. Ibid., 106–7.

51. MJ to Rosenthal, October 15, 1921, ibid., 114. Francis Gérard would not stay long under Jacob’s tutelage; by 1924 he was an active member of the Surrealist group.

52. He described the Abbé Breut’s visits in letters to Kisling, December 14, 1921, and to Fillacier, December 24, 1921; see Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les propos et les jours, 117–19. See also MJ to Picasso, November 27, 1921, in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 186.

53. MJ to Rosenthal, October 15, 1921, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les propos et les jours, 114.

54. MJ, Lettres à Rimbert, 7–9.

55. MJ to Rimbert, December 27, 1921, ibid., 17.

56. Pougy, Mes cahiers, 163.

57. MJ to Kisling, February 21, 1922, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:90.

58. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 186–87.

59. MJ, “Surpris et charmé,” Soirées de Paris, no. 25 (June 1914): 326; RB, in O, 857.

60. MJ, “La Bohème pendant la guerre de 1914,” RB, in O, 849. This story had not been previously published and probably was of recent composition. The appeal to Picasso sounds the poignant note Jacob often struck after Picasso’s marriage to Olga.

61. MJ, “Entrepôt Voltaire,” Action 1, no. 1 (February 1920): 27–48; RB, in O, 862–74. This passage occurs on page 862.

62. MJ to Cocteau, February 3, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 79.

63. Ibid., 78.

64. MJ, Échelle de Jacob: Recueil d’inédits, ed. Nicole and José-Emmanuel Cruz (Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1994), 183–86; Léon Daudet, Le Stupide XIXème siècle (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1922).

65. MJ to Rosenthal, March 10, 1922, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 133. Paris as insane asylum: MJ to Rosenthal, April 17, 1923, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 160.

66. The brothel was at 11 rue de l’Arcade, an extension of the Rue Boissy d’Anglas. Maurice Sachs, who worked for a while as a receptionist at the Hôtel Vouillemont and remained close to Robert and Marie delle Donne, knew the brothel and its proprietor well, and in periods of abasement he practically lived there. Maurice Sachs, Le Sabbat (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 194–201. On Le Cuziat and Proust, see Benjamin Taylor, Proust: The Search (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015), 133–34.

67. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 277–78, 281–82.

68. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 189. Jacob apologized to Picasso for a change in his text; he had written “Cubism, which is Spanish,” and Kahnweiler, not wanting to offend Braque and Léger, asked Jacob to revise it to “Spanish Cubism.”

69. MJ, Lettres à Togorès, 124–26.

70. MJ, “Jardin mystérieux,” Écrits nouveaux, no. 4 (April 1922): 3; PMR, in O, 698. MJ, “Adieux au presbytère de St.-Benoît-sur-Loire” and “Voyages,” Action 3, no. 12 (March–April 1922): 13–16. “Voyages” was reprinted in PMR and MC, in O, 674. “Adieux” is an idealizing poem in rhyming alexandrine couplets that hardly seems to know if it’s a pastiche of Victor Hugo or a serious endeavor. Jacob wrote it in a burst of nostalgia when he was asked to move from the parsonage to the monastery, though the poem treats the “farewell” as if the speaker had to leave the whole region and imagines that experience as training for the ultimate farewell of dying.

71. This story tossed in a typhoon of gossip: Nicole Groult had left her husband to have an affair with Marie Laurencin. MJ to Roland-Manuel, February 23, 1922, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 130–31; MJ to Cocteau, February 3, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 77–78.

72. MJ to Leiris, February 17, 1922, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 53.

73. MJ to Rimbert, c. March 1922, in MJ, Lettres à Rimbert, 20.

74. This letter has a remarkable history. John Ashbery discovered it stuck into the first edition of CD that someone gave him years ago. The letter lacks an envelope but is dated March 10, 1922, and is addressed to “Très chers messieurs et amis” (Dear gentlemen and friends). It opens by thanking them for the payment of the stipend. The letter is in Mr. Ashbery’s personal collection. 

75. MJ to Cocteau, September 21, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 125. The text of the play is in RB, in O, 887–900.

76. Armel, Michel Leiris, 160.

77. Pougy, Mes cahiers, 171.

78. Three of the epistolary tales had come out in the Nouvelle Revue française the previous April, and the other three were new, worked up at the publisher’s request to round out the book. The stories from the Nouvelle Revue française are “À propos du baccalauréat,” “Deux lettres écrites à quinze ans d’intervalle,” and “Ils en ont ri ensemble au café.” In his letter to Picasso in November, Jacob mentioned that he had set aside his novel Filibuth to create a book of “letters with commentaries” for Eugène Montfort, the director of the Bibliothèque des Marges. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 186.

79. Jacob confirmed more than once that Madame Gagelin was based on his mother. See the discussion in Chapter 1; MJ, Lettres à Levanti, 66; and Autobiographie pour Paul Petit, in O, 1780n3.

80. MJ, “Conseils d’une mere à sa fille,” CN, in O, 978.

81. Paul Morand, “Le Cabinet noir de Max Jacob,” Nouvelle Revue française, no. 109 (October 1922): 489–90. Jacques Porel, another mondain, Doucet’s godson and the son of the actress Réjane, whose decadent company, Jacob thought, endangered him in Paris, described CN as “a masterpiece of wit and French style” in Les Feuilles libres, no. 28 (August–September 1922): 296–97. An enlarged edition of CN would be published by the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1928.

82. Georges Gabory, “Le Roi de Béotie, par Max Jacob,” Nouvelle Revue française 18, no. 102 (March 1922): 347–48. André Malraux, “Art poétique,” Nouvelle Revue française 19, no. 107 (August 1922): 227–28.

83. Jacob planned to dedicate AP to Cocteau: “À mon jeune ami Jean Cocteau, auteur du Coq et l’Arlequin.” Cocteau’s friends objected that the phrase infantilized Cocteau and misrepresented his oeuvre by reducing it to a single title. (Jacob chose that title because it was Cocteau’s book on aesthetics.) Irritated, Jacob wrote his publishers Émile-Paul to revise the text to “À Jean Cocteau, son ami, Max Jacob.” For whatever reason—it’s not clear why—the book appeared with no dedication. Cocteau wrote to assure Jacob that he was not offended. MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 82–83.

84. MJ to Cocteau, July 8, 1921, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 69.

85. AP, in O, 1358. See note on Radiguet in O, 1786.

86. O, 1359. Jean Cocteau, Poésie critique (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1959), 64–65.

87. Cocteau to MJ, June 24, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 85–86. In Secret professionnel: “What is style? For many people, a complicated way of saying very simple things. In my opinion, a very simple way of saying complicated things,” in Cocteau, Poésie critique, 17. In this letter from Le Lavandou, Cocteau continued the discussion of the nightingale as a figure for art. 

88. MJ and Raymond Radiguet, “Edwige ou le héros,” Écrits du Nord 1, 2nd ser., no. 2 (December 1922): 42–51. After the authors’ names appeared the statement, “Fine stories make good friends.” For the play written with Radiguet, see Hélène Henry, “Chronologie du théâtre de Max Jacob,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 9 (1987): 46. Max Jacob wrote punctiliously to Cocteau, November 6, 1922, “since Raymond doesn’t reply to me about Edwige,” to report on the terms of publishing the story, promising Radiguet half the payment of 100 francs. MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 143.

89. AP, in O, 1352n4. On the manuscript, Jacob crossed out an “R” next to the second statement. See Rodriguez’s note in O, 1786. 

90. O, 1348.

91. Ibid., 1349.

92. Ibid., 1353.

93. Ibid., 1355.

94. Ibid., 1352.

95. Ibid., 1349. See MJ’s essays “La cinquième plaie du Crucifié et la ‘connaissance tragique’ de Nietzsche,” Nord-Sud, no. 4–5 (June–July 1917): 17, in O, 1385; and “La conscience psychologique et la cinquième plaie du Crucifié,” Nord-Sud, no. 6–7 (August–September 1917): n.p., in O, 1386.

96. Armel, Michel Leiris, 168.

97. MJ to Kahnweiler, April 21, 1922, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:98.

98. Ibid. 

99. He reported on the trip to Cocteau and to Leiris, who was soon to visit. MJ to Cocteau, May 1, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 81–82; MJ to Leiris, May 7, 1922, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 59–61.

100. Giovanni Leonardi, “Le poète Max Jacob, souvenirs quimpérois,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 8 (1986): 29–31.

101. MJ to Cocteau, May 1, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 81.

102. Cocteau to MJ, May 22, 1922, ibid., 83.

103. Les Feuilles libres published a chunk of Jacob’s forthcoming novel TB in April and a suite of his burlesque poems for Poulenc in August. Raval was the enterprising young man who had run off with Marcelle Meyer, Pierre Bertin’s wife. MJ, “Dimanche à Guichen,” Feuilles libres 4, no. 26 (April 1922): 92–99; “Poèmes burlesques,” Feuilles libres 4, no. 28 (August–September 1922): 47, 63–67. PMR: “Poésie,” “Le Petit pot de fleurs,” “La Belle Attitude,” “Hortense,” and “Cécile,” in O, 687–90.

104. Jean Cocteau, “M’entendez-vous ainsi?,” in Vocabulaire, Plain-Chant, et autres poèmes, 1922–1946 (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 103. 

105. Roger Allard, “Vocabulaire, Poèmes, par Jean Cocteau,” Nouvelle Revue française 9, no. 105 (June 1922): 745–47.

106. Cocteau to MJ, August 16, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 103. 

107. Sophie Fishbach and Patricia Sustrac, “Max Jacob–Jules Supervielle, Correspondance croisée (1922–1935),” Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 13–14 (2013): 220.

108. Ibid., 222.

109. Ibid., 226.

110. MJ, “Monnaie de couleurs,” Disque vert 1, no. 3 (July 1922): 1.

111. MJ to Leiris, May 30, 1922, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 62.

112. Leiris, L’Âge d’homme, 187.

113. MJ, “Réponse de l’Abbé X . . . à un jeune homme découragé,” Vie des lettres et des arts, no. 10 (June 1922), in CN, in O, 1075.

114. MJ to Leiris, November 24, 1921, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 32. CN, in O, 1075.

115. MJ to Madame Aurel, July 4, 1922, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 138.

116. Assouline, L’homme de l’art, 345. In English, Pierre Assouline, An Artful Life: A Biography of D. H. Kahnweiler 1884–1979, trans. Charles Ruas (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 179.

117. MJ to Cocteau, June 28, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 88. MJ to Leiris, May 30, 1922, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 62n90.

118. MJ to Leiris, July 12, 1922, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 64.

119. Ibid., 63.

120. MJ to Cocteau, July 28, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 97, 103. MJ to the Ghikas, July 31, 1922, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 139.

121. Jean Dubuffet, Biographie au pas de course (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 20. Dubuffet later wrote frankly about this formative friendship, which persisted in spite of Jacob’s age, his Catholicism, and his homosexuality. Ironically, Dubuffet’s wife divorced him in 1933, accusing him of homosexuality because of his friendship with Jacob (Biographie au pas de course, 31). Jacob wrote a comic letter to his then-lover René Dulsou describing Madame Dubuffet’s accusations and misapprehensions. MJ, Amitiés, 1:297–98.

122. Jacob liked Blois but found the château “sinister,” quoting a line by Georges Ghika, “Here’s the sinister château of Saint Germain.” MJ to Cocteau, July 28, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 98.

123. Leiris to his mother, in Armel, Michel Leiris, 157–58.

124. MJ to Cocteau, August 19, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 108.

125. MJ to Cocteau, August 29, 1922, ibid., 111, 112.

126. MJ to Cocteau, September 5, 1922, ibid., 114. 

127. Armel, Michel Leiris, 158.

128. Ibid. 

129. MJ to Leiris, October 26, 1922, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 78.

130. Both of these pamphlets were published by Gallimard after Jacob’s death. Conseils à un jeune poète (O, 1689–1713) was a notebook composed for Jacques Évrard, and Conseils à un étudiant (O, 1717–45) was addressed to Jacques Lesage.

131. MJ to Leiris, September 1 and 28, 1922, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 69–73. 

132. MJ to Leiris, August 21, 1922, ibid., 66.

133. Ibid., 66–68.

134. Ibid., 69.

135. O, 667. The manuscript is in the Médiathèque d’Orléans, ms. 2264, p. 52.

136. MJ, “L’Amour et le temps,” Revue européenne 6, no. 2 (July–August 1923): 20; PMR, in O, 705.

137. MJ to Leiris, August 1922, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 69.

138. HCHR (Paris: Kra, 1924), 57. Reprinted by Gallimard, 1933.

139. MJ to Leiris, November 10, 1922, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 81.

140. MJ, “La Fiancée de l’aviateur,” Revue européenne 6, no. 2 (August 1923): 22; PMR, in O, 685. Jacob borrowed from Apollinaire’s “Zone” the main pun, voler (to fly), voleur (thief), and voltigeur (vaulter, trapeze artist). It appeared in the same issue of La Revue européenne with the poem dedicated to Leiris and one dedicated to André Beaudin, another painter in Masson’s clan. When Jacob published “La Fiancée de l’aviateur” in PMR, he removed the dedication to Dubuffet, but he retained it for another poem in the volume, “Les Arbres.” 

141. For the correspondence between Jacob and Cocteau on the play La Leçon de diction, see MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 123–28. MJ to Gabory, October 6, 1922, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:113. MJ to Kahnweiler, October 10, 1922, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:126–27. For Jacob’s debt to Tual, see MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 81. Jacob’s apology to Tual, October 20, 1922, in Denise Tual, Au Coeur du temps (Paris: Carrère, 1987), 150–54. The silly play, retitled Le Journal de modes ou les ressources de Florimond (The Fashion Magazine or Florimond’s Schemes), was never produced. The manuscript is in the collection of the Médiathèque d’Orléans, ms. 2248.

142. Louis Aragon, “Projet d’histoire de literature contemporaine,” Littérature, new ser., no. 4 (September 1922): 6. Jacques Baron, “Philippe Soupault, Westwego,” ibid., 23.

143. André Breton, “Clairement,” Littérature, new ser., no. 4 (September 1922): 1–2. There are many accounts of the battle around Tzara’s play Le Coeur à gaz at the Théâtre Michel, July 6, 1923. Massot, taking the side of Dada, droned condemnations of Gide, Picasso, and Picabia, and Breton leapt on stage and smashed his arm with a walking stick, while Desnos and Péret held him pinned. See Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), 191, and Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 278.

144. Breton, “Clairement,” 2.

145. Aragon, “Projet d’histoire,” 3–6.

146. André Breton, “Entrée des Médiums,” Littérature, new ser., no. 6 (November 1922): 1–2.

147. MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 126–31. Jacob mixed up the story of the Burghers: they left the city to offer the keys to the besieging conqueror, the English king, not to ask for the keys.

148. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 190.

149. MJ to Salmon, September 21, 1922, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:124–26. MJ to Cocteau, September 28, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 128–29.

150. MJ to Cocteau, September 18, 1922, in MJ and Jean Cocteau, Correspondance, 119.

151. Jacob had borrowed a flowing white Arab robe from Lucien in order to dress up as a monk at a costume party given by the dancer Caryathis in March 1921. Caryathis, who claimed to have been quite close to Jacob, later married his friend the novelist Marcel Jouhandeau. MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 45.

152. Daudet, Le Stupide XIXème siècle, 181.

153. MJ, L’Échelle de Jacob, 183–86. The passages on the misinterpretation of the Kabbalah and on the number 666 in the Apocalypse are copied from notes Jacob had been accumulating for years. Versions may be found in the manuscript “Les Dix Plaies d’Egypte” in the Médiathèque d’Orléans (ms. 2271), reprinted in L’Échelle de Jacob, and in the manuscript “Anatomie religieuse,” ms. 8.140.3, pp. 301–426, in BLJD. A year after Jacob’s visit, Léon Daudet’s fourteen-year-old son died of a gunshot to the head, an apparent suicide, after having run away from home. His father blamed the government and anarchists, was sentenced to five months of prison for defamation, and made a spectacular escape to Belgium. He was pardoned in 1930.

154. MJ to Cocteau, September 21, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 124–25. He criticized the book more severely to Jean Cassou in 1930. See Max Jacob écrit: Lettres à six amis, ed. Anne Kimball (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015), 132.

155. MJ to Gabory, September 28, 1922, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:110.

156. MJ to Cocteau, September 28, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 128.

157. MJ to Cocteau, October 6, 1922, ibid., 137.

158. MJ to Leiris, c. November or December 1922, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 85.

159. A letter dictated to his publishers the Émile-Paul brothers is in Dubuffet’s hand, and so is a copy of a poem in the manuscript of PMR. Jean de Palacio, “Max Jacob 2: Romanesques,” Revue des lettres modernes, new ser., no. 474–78 (1976): 67.

160. MJ to Cocteau, August 16, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 105.

161. MJ to Roland-Manuel, c. December 1922, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 148.

162. For the money: MJ to Leiris, January 28, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 86. For the clothes: Gabory, Apollinaire, 47.

163. MJ to Cocteau, December 4, 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 145.

164. Denise would meet Max Jacob a few years later with Robert and Marie delle Donne at the Hôtel Vouillemont, and not long after that she married Jacob’s friend Roland Tual. Tual, Au Coeur, 59–60.

165. MJ to Cocteau, December 1922, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 146.

166. MJ to Madame Aurel, December 1922, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 148.

167. MJ to Henri Hertz, January 5, 1923, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:139. MJ to Salmon, c. January 1923, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:118.

168. MJ to Leiris, c. January 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 85.

169. Ibid., 86.

170. MJ to Roland-Manuel, February 3, 1923, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 152.

171. MJ to Leiris, October 9, 1922, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 75.

172. MJ to Leiris, February 17, 1923, ibid., 89.

173. Christine Van Rogger Andreucci analyzes the relations of Jacob and Leiris, as well as Jacob’s portrait of Leiris, in her introduction to MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 22–24. Jacob also drew partly on Nino Frank for the Reflected Man: Frank, Mémoire, 143.

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1. The name bears Jacob’s signature in the pun on cygne/signe, “swan/sign.”

2. Liane didn’t like the novel: “A jumble of manners and slang from the lowest of the criminal lowlife with a smattering of philosophy.” Pougy, Mes cahiers, 191.

3. Jacques Porel, “Filibuth,” Intentions, no. 16 (June 1923): 28–29.

4. Benjamin Crémieux, “Les Lettres françaises,” Nouvelles littéraires, April 28, 1923, 2.

5. Philippe Soupault, “Filibuth,” Revue européenne, no. 4 (June 1923): 102–3. It was also reviewed in Le Figaro, and in the Mercure de France, the aging Symbolist eminence Rachilde featured Filibuth and complimented Jacob on the portrait of Madame Lafleur, noting that the book was really a collection of monologues. Rachilde, “Les Romans,” Mercure de France, June 15, 1923, 748.

6. To compound the effrontery of the jury, Max Jacob figured as a minor character, Maxime Lévy, in Soupault’s novel.

7. André Germain, “Raymond Radiguet, Le Diable au corps,” Revue européenne, no. 4 (June 1923): 67.

8. MJ to Cocteau, January 30 and February 1, 1923, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 148–50.

9. Along with Cocteau and Jacob, the jury included Gertrude Stein’s friend Bernard Faÿ, who organized the prize with money from an American donor, and Jacques de Lacretelle, all of whom voted for Radiguet; and Giraudoux, Valery Larbaud, and Paul Morand, who voted for Soupault. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 305–7; MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 149n1. Faÿ is remembered now mainly for his murderous activities as a collaborator during the war.

10. MJ to Cocteau, May 26, 1923, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 157.

11. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 307.

12. In a letter to Jean Grenier in May 1922, Jacob said he would be in Paris in June to “meet a gentleman coming from Spain.” This is most likely Bounoure. MJ, Lettres à un ami, 9.

13. MJ to Jouhandeau, c. April 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 46.

14. Ibid., 51.

15. MJ to Jouhandeau, December 6, 1923, ibid., 83.

16. MJ to Jouhandeau, May 31, 1923, ibid., 52.

17. Marcel Jouhandeau, “Le Mage,” Disque vert 2, no. 2 (November 1923): 60.

18. Jules Supervielle, “Apparition de Max Jacob,” Disque vert 2, no. 2 (November 1923): 54; reprinted as “Apparition” in Jules Supervielle, Oeuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Michel Collot (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1996), 163.

19. To the Ghikas, Jacob sent a bowdlerized account of his visit: “I’ve just returned from an admirable countryside, the Creuse, where I stayed with a university professor [sic], with Marcel Jouhandeau, the glory of tomorrow morning, and Jules Supervielle. A gathering full of tidy children and sweet ladies, one even very beautiful (Spanish style). Cars, cakes, reading of Horace, exquisite poet I didn’t know.” May 27, 1923, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 166.

20. MJ, “The Early Days of Pablo Picasso,” 62–64.

21. Richardson discusses the “chill” in Picasso’s portraits of Olga from this period: Richardson, Life, 3:219. The whole sorry story of the marriage is documented in the catalogue of the show Olga Picasso at the Picasso Museum in Paris: Olga Picasso, ed. Emilia Philippot, Joachim Pissarro, and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (Paris: Gallimard, Musée National Picasso, 2017).

22. MJ to Kahnweiler, April 17, 1923, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:152.

23. MJ to Kahnweiler, June 4, 1923, in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 193. MJ to Kisling, June 15, 1923, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 170.

24. MJ to Leiris, June 23, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 102.

25. Marcel Arland, “Le Terrain Bouchaballe, par Max Jacob,” Nouvelle Revue française, no. 119 (August 1923): 228–30.

26. For the Goncourt, see Jacob’s letter to his publishers, Émile-Paul, of October 30, 1923, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 196. About the Church warning, see the letter to Jacques Dyssord, December 25, 1923, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 202–3; MJ to Jouhandeau, December 9, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 87; MJ to Cocteau, December 2, 1923, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 173.

27. TB, in O, 1107.

28. MJ to Leiris, June 22, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 100–103. Michel Leiris, Journal 1922–1989, ed. Jean Jamin (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 207; Armel, Michel Leiris, 171.

29. MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 103.

30. MJ to Leiris, June 22, 1923, ibid., 103-4.

31. MJ to the Ghikas, May 27, 1923, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 166.

32. MJ to Nino Frank, June 23, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Nino Frank, ed. Anne Kimball (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 26.

33. Madame Aurel to her husband, the writer Alfred Mortier, July 7, 1923, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 174–75.

34. MJ to Cocteau, August 16, 1923, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 166.

35. Ibid., 166–67. Jacob also mentioned the debacle in a letter to Nino Frank on August 2, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Frank, 30.

36. MJ to the Ghikas, July 17, 1923, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 175–76; Pougy, Mes cahiers, 193.

37. MJ to Leiris, July 11, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 104–5.

38. MJ to Kisling, July 15, 1923, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:123.

39. MJ to Madame Aurel, August 1, 1923, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 181.

40. MJ to Frank, August 2, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Frank, 30.

41. MJ to Madame Aurel, August 1, 1923, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:191.

42. Pougy, Mes cahiers, 193.

43. Ibid., 194. “Fag” in French is tapette.

44. Ibid., 195.

45. MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 15.

46. Pougy, Mes cahiers, 194.

47. Composition of HCHR: MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 109. The new prose poems: “Le Carnet à piston,” Feuilles libres, no. 33 (September–October 1923): 157–65. The group included three verse poems he would reprint in PMR: “Sur les dalles en mosaïque,” “Marines à Roscoff,” and “Réponse à l’apparition,” in O, 680, 681, 697. The title “Le Carnet à piston” alludes punningly both to the musical instrument, the cornet (which has pistons and is sometimes called le cornet à pistons), and to the title of his first collection of prose poems, CD. Technically, a carnet à piston is a notebook of influential names (string-pulling Log). 

48. MJ to Frank, August 15, 1923, in Lettres à Frank, 32.

49. MJ to Grenier, September 14, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à un ami, 18.

50. MJ to Jouhandeau, September 12, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 67.

51. MJ to the Ghikas, August 25, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 39.

52. MJ to Jouhandeau, September 12, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 70. MJ to Cocteau, August 29, 1923, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 171.

53. MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 170.

54. Salacrou’s memories of Jacob are venomous. He depicts him as a clown, a babbling charmer in company, and, when alone, desperate and pathetic. The scene of the sale of gouache is in Salacrou, Dans la salle des pas perdus (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 135.

55. MJ to Salacrou, January 16, 1924, in MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou, 31.

56. MJ to Salacrou, November 28, 1923, ibid., 27. The play was Le Casseur d’assiettes (The Plate-Smasher), which was never performed but which Kra published with lithographs by Gris. Nino Frank described a session later that year at Saint-Benoît when Salacrou read the play out loud: “It was in alexandrines and smacked of Rostand. No matter; what I retain is Max’s grand performance, beginning by treating the play as a masterpiece, and then, little by little, with his special pirouetting fluency, slipping in bits of criticism, amplifying them by repetition (like Antony, in Shakespeare), and finally reducing the masterpiece to a glove compartment, soon to be forgotten by doing something better without moonlight or trumpets.” Frank, Mémoire, 159. On November 11, the poet Georges Limbour, visiting Jacob at Saint-Benoît, joined him in a letter of detailed critique of Salacrou’s play: “Drama lives in action; yours is devoid of action. . . . If your action takes place in dream give your characters more realistic details; if your action takes place in reality, give them as much dream as possible.” MJ and Limbour to Salacrou, November 11, 1923, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:240–43.

57. MJ to Salacrou, September 13, 1923, in MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou, 13.

58. Pougy, Mes cahiers, 197.

59. Ibid., 197. Jacob recounted his woes to various friends: MJ to Kahnweiler, September 24, 1923, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:212; MJ to André Lefèvre, December 25, 1923, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:259–61.

60. MJ to Kahnweiler, September 24, 1923, ibid., 2:211. MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 42.

61. MJ to the Ghikas, October 25, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 46.

62. MJ, “Le Promeneur non solitaire,” Intentions, no. 17 (July–August 1923): 1–5, in O, 1332; reprinted in the little book Le Nom (Liège: À la Lampe d’Aladin, 1926). “Le Nom,” Europe, no. 8 (September 1923): 385–96, in O, 1325; also reprinted in Le Nom. 

63. Gabriel Bounoure, “Max Jacob, romancier,” Intentions, no. 18 (September–October 1923): 4–21. “At the heart of Jacob’s psychology and art, there’s this vision of man’s duplicity, complicated by the experience of an unstable, diverse, and tormented personality. . . . What is our ‘I’? . . . Nothing is more false to our own ‘I’ than the ‘I’ itself. . . . It leads to an attack on lyric romanticism founded on the illusion of self. ‘Personality is only a persistent error.’ . . .” Bounoure set the terms of the discussion, which is elaborated today in the sophisticated critical work of Alexander Dickow, Le Poète innombrable (Paris: Hermann, 2015).

64. Valery Larbaud, “Hommage à Max Jacob,” Intentions, no. 20 (December 1923): 1–3. Reprinted as Valery Larbaud, “Valery Larbaud, 13 décembre 1923,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 1 (1978): 88–89.

65. Florent Fels, “Propos d’artistes: Picasso,” Nouvelles littéraires, August 4, 1923, 1.

66. MJ to Salacrou, October 14, 1923, in MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou, 18.

67. MJ to Fillacier, October 21, 1923, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 189.

68. MJ to Fillacier, November 14, 1923, ibid., 197.

69. MJ to Kisling, November 1, 1923, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:234.

70. MJ to Jouhandeau, December 24, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 89; also 80 (early November), and 86 (December 9, 1923): “Accumulate despair; it’s in those moments that one learns something.” MJ to Leiris, December 2, 1923: “The secret of great works is in the heart’s sorrow; the works of pride give only bitterness,” in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 121.

71. MJ to Salacrou, November 5, 1923, in MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou, 23–24.

72. MJ to George Ghika, September 26, 1923, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 187.

73. MJ to the Ghikas, October 25 and December 16, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 46, 49, 51, 54. Jacob was wearing the vest and boasted of it when he welcomed Nino Frank to Saint-Benoît: Frank, Mémoire, 130.

74. MJ to Leiris, n.d., in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 116. MJ to Salacrou, November 11, 1923, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:240–42.

75. MJ to Grenier, October 28, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à un ami, 20–21.

76. MJ to Grenier, September 3, 1923, ibid., 15.

77. MJ to the Ghikas, October 25, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 45.

78. MJ to Roland-Manuel, October 28, 1923, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:222.

79. MJ to Frank, August 2, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Frank, 30. 

80. Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:248. Also in Frank, Mémoire, 155.

81. MJ to Cocteau, December 2, 1923, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 172–73.

82. Frank to Cocteau, December 2, 1923, ibid., 174. 

83. MJ to Cocteau, August 16, 1923, ibid., 167.

84. “Paris killed him,” Jacob wrote years later to a patron, Louis Dumoulin. “I mean, success, with its parade of late nights, sleeplessness, excesses.” MJ to Dumoulin, July 12, 1941, in Max Jacob écrit, 205. To Marcel Béalu, he was even more direct: Radiguet was a young man whom “X, I, and other killed,” he said. Béalu, Dernier visage, 56.

85. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 314.

86. Ibid., 314–15.

87. Frank describes this eerie visit in Frank, Mémoire, 146–48.

88. Jacob called Radiguet “l’enfant roi.” MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 79.

89. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 314–17. MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 177n9.

90. Cocteau to Jacob, December 25, 1923, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 170.

91. Ibid., 175–83.

92. Ibid., 176. MJ to Pougy, December 23, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 50.

93. MJ to Cocteau, December 23, 1923, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 175–77.

94. MJ to Leiris, December 25, 1923, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 121–23.

95. Michel Leiris, “Désert de mains,” Intentions 3, no. 21 (January–February 1924): 23–26.

96. MJ to Jouhandeau, February 25, 1924, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 92. 

97. He had always been fascinated by doubles, especially pairs of fleshly and spiritual complements like Cordier and Matorel in SM and Monsieur Dur and “Max Jacob” in F. MJ to Grenier, October 2, 1924, in MJ, Lettres à un ami, 41. 

98. Across the Channel, T. S. Eliot, in the second year of editing The Criterion, took note of Philosophies and considered it one of the most intelligent journals in France. He especially admired an essay by Jean Grenier. See his letter to Lady Rothermere, April 27, 1924, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1923–1925, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011), 2:383–85. Eliot inquired about Jacob that same month but never published him in The Criterion.

99. MJ to Salacrou, February 11, 1924, in MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou, 35. To Jouhandeau, June 2 and early July 1924, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 106, 120. 

100. MJ, “Notes à propos des Beaux-Arts,” Philosophies 1, no. 3 (March 1924): 1–5. These notes read like an extension of AP, with yet another citing of Christ’s “fifth wound” as the core of the aesthetic idea: “Until a thought has descended from our intellectual self into the physical self, it can’t serve an artistic purpose (explication of the fifth wound of the crucified one and the cult of the Sacred Heart).”

101. Henri Lefèbvre, interview with author. He told me that remembering Jacob was painful for him: “He was terrible, Max Jacob,” and “perverted.” Lefèbvre kept mentioning Jacob’s poverty, which he said he brought on himself, and mentioned some incident with a choirboy at Saint-Benoît. As to his religion: “In converting, he tried to create another identity, which wasn’t his own. He remained profoundly Jewish.” 

102. André Breton, Les pas perdus (1924; reprint Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 79. The original essay “Gaspard de la Nuit” came out in 1920 in the Nouvelle Revue Française.

103. Many of Jacob’s letters to Mendès-France are in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours. His letters to Level are in the Médiathèque des Ursulines in Quimper (Fonds Max Jacob, ms. 22) and the Bibliothèque Nationale; they have been published in Lettres à André Level, ed. Bernard Duchatelet (Quimper: Bibliothèque Municipale, 1994). On February 10, 1924, Jacob wrote to Nino Frank that he couldn’t go to Paris, as Gallimard had “cut off his provisions,” in MJ, Lettres à Frank, 41.

104. The publishing house Kra was run by Simon Kra and his son Lucien. They had also started two literary journals, Le Journal Littéraire and La Revue européenne. At this time, Soupault was a reader for the publishing house, managing editor of La Revue européenne, and a reader for Le Journal Littéraire. MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 122.

105. MJ to Jouhandeau, May 26, 1924, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 101–2. Radiguet is quoted by Cocteau in “Souvenir,” in Jean Cocteau, Oeuvres completes (Lausanne: Marguerat, 1946–51), 11:457–58: ‘‘‘We have to write poems and novels like everybody else,’ that is to say, like nobody.” Cited in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 103–4. Picasso, when he broke from Cubism in 1915 by making the pencil portrait of Jacob, said he wanted “to see if he could still draw like everybody else.” Henri Mahaut, Picasso (Paris: Crès, 1930), 12.

106. Ballan-Goujart, the Man of Flesh, also has some elements of Gabriel Guernolé, the Abbé Breut’s brother’s brother-in-law, who lived at the monastery. Nino Frank describes sessions of composition of the novel, where Jacob used Frank and Guernolé as “guinea pigs” for his characters. Frank, Mémoire, 142–43.

107. MJ to Edmond Jaloux, May 3, 1924, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:287.

108. HCHR, 233. Italics in original.

109. Frédéric Lefèvre, “Une heure avec Max Jacob,” Nouvelles littéraires, April 12, 1924, 102; reprinted in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 229–33.

110. MJ to Jouhandeau, July 3, 1925, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 199, 200.

111. MJ to Kahnweiler, May 13, 1924, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:289.

112. Jacques Viot, “L’Homme de chair et l’homme reflet,” Intentions 3, no. 25 (June 1924): 54–55.

113. Marcel Arland, “L’Homme de chair et l’homme reflet, par Max Jacob,” Nouvelle Revue française 22, no. 129 (June 1924): 747–48. John Charpentier, Mercure de France, September 15, 1924, 764–65. Georges Thialet, “Max Jacob romancier,” Sélection, no. 8 (June 1924): 209–17. Gille Anthelme, “L’Homme de chair et l’homme reflet,” Sélection, no. 8 (June 1924): 279–80. René Lalou, “L’Homme de chair et l’homme reflet,” Vient de paraître, September 1924, 445–46. In a more negative vein, Firmin Roz in La Revue bleue took HCHR as an example of the contemporary French novel, a genre dominated by fantasy and humor. He criticized Jacob’s flow of speech and wandering plot, concluding that the fantasy and humor veiled a basic “brutal realism.” Firmin Roz, “Le Roman: le réalisme et l’humour,” Revue bleue 62, no. 13 (July 5, 1924): 463–65.

114. Lefèvre, “Une heure avec Max Jacob,” 1–2.

115. On February 4, 1924, Jacob wrote René Mendès-France of the gallery: “I’m forced to fall back on painting since Gallimard, I have no idea why, forgets the pension he formally promised me,” in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:275–76.

116. MJ to Salacrou, April 28, 1924, in MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou, 40.

117. MJ to the Salacrous, April 28, 1924, ibid., 40–42. 

118. MJ to Mendès-France, June 6, 1924, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 220–21. MJ to Kahnweiler, May 13, 1924, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:289–91.

119. MJ to Jouhandeau, March 8, 1924, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 94.

120. MJ to Jouhandeau, June 2, 1924, ibid., 107.

121. Entry for March 30, 1924, in Leiris, Journal 1922–1989, 34. 

122. MJ to Jouhandeau, April 20, 1924, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 99.

123. MJ to the Salacrous, April 28, 1924, in MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou, 40.

124. MJ to Jouhandeau, May 26, 1924, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 101–2.

125. MJ to Jouhandeau, June 19, 1924, ibid., 113–14.

126. MJ to Jouhandeau, August 24, 1924, ibid., 128. Glimpses of Jouhandeau’s tribulations with Leiris appear in his letters to Jacob: Lettres de Marcel Jouhandeau à Max Jacob, ed. Anne Kimball (Paris: Droz, 2002), 38, 62. On May 18, 1924, Jouhandeau informed Jacob that he still saw Leiris, but less and less: “First it was he who fled from me, now it’s I who flee him, without abandoning him.” In late December 1924, Jouhandeau wrote calmly that he saw Masson and Leiris often and that they spoke affectionately of Jacob.

127. MJ to Jouhandeau, June 2, 1924, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 106.

128. Jacob recounted the adventure with Pierre Robert in letters to Jouhandeau in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 126, 134; to the Salacrous, in MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou, 55–56; and to the Ghikas, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 204. The following July, Robert turned up courting Cocteau in Paris, and Jacob tried delicately to warn his friend about Robert’s “ferocious social climbing” while at the same time exercising Christian charity: MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 330, 333.

129. MJ, “Ethnographie du démon,” VI, in O, 643.

130. As it’s hard to tell faith from the liver, it’s hard to tell Christ from the anti-Christ: the man with the knife has a capitalized pronoun, and may be Christ or His antithesis. MJ, “L’Attentat,” VI, in O, 662.

131. Ibid., 648.

132. MJ, “Dans le brouhaha de la foire,” ibid., 657.

133. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 195; MJ self-portrait in O, 640. Most of the poems of VI were previously unpublished, but a handful had appeared in Les Cahiers idéalistes: “Ethnographie du démon,” “Les démons du matin au réveil,” “Que penser de mon salut,” “Le pied du démon,” and “Purgatoire.” Two had come out in Action 1, no. 4 (July 1920): “Jamais plus!” and “Repas.” The poem “Voisonage” rewrote and darkened “Poème manqué,” a poem published years earlier in OBM, in O, 289. The book was hardly reviewed. Marcel Arland, usually sympathetic to Jacob, said in the Nouvelle Revue française that Jacob’s hell resembled an opera set and child’s catechism: Marcel Arland, “Visions infernales,” Nouvelle Revue française, no. 23 (September 1924): 360. Fernand Divoire was downright contemptuous: “One isn’t moved to take this frightful outcry for a work of literature.” Fernand Divoire, “Kodak, Blaise Cendrars, et Visions infernales, Max Jacob,” Journal littéraire, no. 4 (May 17, 1924): 11.

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1. Jacob had offered the article to Pierre André-May for Intentions, not knowing that Jouhandeau had given it to Soupault for La Revue européenne; Soupault seems to have passed it along to Le Journal littéraire, where he was also a reader, and where it was published on July 12, 1924. It appeared in Intentions in the July/ August issue: MJ, “Titres des chapitres pour une étude approximative sur Marcel Jouhandeau,” Intentions 3, no. 26 (July–August 1924): 1–2. See Anne Kimball’s account of the complex publishing history in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 121–22, and in Jouhandeau, Lettres à Max Jacob, 47–48. 

2. Marcel Jouhandeau, “Monsieur Godeau et les Parques,” Intentions 3, no. 26 (July–August 1924): 3–19.

3. MJ to Jouhandeau, August 5, 1924, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 131.

4. MJ to Jouhandeau, August 11 and 28, 1924, ibid., 137–39.

5. Pougy, Mes cahiers, 206.

6. MJ to Cocteau, August 17, 1924, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 197.

7. MJ to Jouhandeau, August 28, 1924, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 138–40.

8. Jacob gave one account to Grenier (MJ, Lettres à un ami, 33) and another to Jouhandeau (MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 142).

9. MJ to Jouhandeau, October 12, 1924, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 151–53.

10. MJ to Level, September 9, 1924, in ms. 22, Fonds Max Jacob, Médiathèque des Ursulines, Quimper. Émié, Dialogues, 45. MJ to Frank, October 19 1924, in MJ, Lettres à Frank, 62.

11. MJ to Jouhandeau, November 1924, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 158–60.

12. MJ to Norbert Guterman, September 9, 1924, in Ms. 0528, Box 1, Guterman Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

13. MJ to the Salacrous, November 30, 1924, in MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou, 77–80.

14. MJ to Jouhandeau, December 31, 1924, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 170.

15. Gallimard pressed him hard to produce the manuscript but didn’t publish it until 1929, with drawings by Jacob. Sections appeared in Philosophies no. 4 (November 1924) and in Selection (December 1924). The Nouvelle Revue Française brought out an expanded edition, Bourgeois de France et d’ailleurs, in 1932.

16. MJ to Frank, December 28, 1924, in MJ, Lettres à Frank, 70.

17. Jacob’s new poems were four prose poems, “Visions infernales supplémentaires,” in Philosophies 1, no. 3 (September 1924): 339–40, and a sequence of six entitled “Psychologies” in Philosophies 1, no. 4 (November 1920): 373–79. The section of Tableau de la bourgeoisie appeared in the same issue. Jacob “reviewed” HCHR in Philosophies 1, no. 3 (September 1924): 335, the same issue in which Morhange reviewed VI. 

18. MJ to Salacrou, January 7, 1925, in MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou, 87.

19. MJ to Tzara, December 8, 1924, in Correspondance, ed. Garnier, 2:345–46.

20. MJ to the Salacrous, March 18, 1925, in MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou, 105.

21. Jean Grenier, “Max Jacob, poète breton,” Bretagne touristique, January 15, 1925, 6–7.

22. MJ and Jacques Maritain, Correspondance 1924–1935, ed. Sylvain Guéna (Brest: Centre d’Études des Correspondances, CNRS, 1999), 22.

23. Jacques Maritain, “À propos de la question juive,” Vie Spirituelle 2, no. 4 (July 1921), cited in Jacques Maritain, L’Impossible antisémitisme, ed. Pierre Vidal-Naquet (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1994), 62.

24. Maritain, L’Impossible antisémitisme, 64.

25. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 338.

26. Cocteau to MJ, c. January 1925, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 205.

27. MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 177.

28. MJ to Cocteau, March 19, 1925, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 211.

29. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 199.

30. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 339–43.

31. Ibid., 348.

32. MJ, “Les Yeux au ventre,” Revue juive 1, no. 1 (January 15, 1925): 31–35. Reprinted in Le Nom in 1926, dedicated to Albert Cohen, and in FE, without the dedication, in O, 1416.

33. MJ to Paulhan, April 3, 1925, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 101.

34. And quite a bulwark he would have been. Already an anti-Semite, Jouhandeau at this point in their friendship regarded Jacob as a Catholic and wrote openly to him about hating Jews for their guilt in the “intolerable Error,” the killing of Christ. In October 1924, Jouhandeau boasted, “I spoke very ill of the Jews to Morhange. It’s the truly astonishing thing about this people, that one can hate them so much, while loving them all the more. The very repugnance that they inspire, attracts, when the blazing attraction they exert should repel.” Jouhandeau, Lettres à Max Jacob, 56–57. This emotional tangle of attraction and repulsion is a good example of the psychological intensity not just of anti-Semitism but of what David Nirenberg has called anti-Judaism, the obsession with Jews that European Christians nursed over many centuries in imaginary dramas having little or nothing to do with real Jews.

35. Jacob narrated this scene to Cocteau, confined in his clinic, on March 21, 1925, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 213, and to Salacrou on March 18, 1925, in MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou, 104–7.

36. MJ, Seven letters to Georges Cattauï, ms. 3253, BLJD. Cattauï did eventually convert but not necessarily because of Jacob.

37. “And my spirit is in anguish within me,” in the Douay Rheims translation of the Vulgate. In the standard French translation by Crampon: “Lorsqu’en moi mon esprit défaille.” KJV: “When my spirit is overwhelmed within me.”

38. MJ, “La Clef des songes,” Philosophies, no. 5 (March 1925): 573–83. Many passages draw on the unpublished text “Différents états d’esprit out portrait de l’auteur au travail,” ms. 7198 (4) 1, BLJD. 

39. Giovanni Leonardi, “Le poète Max Jacob, souvenirs quimpérois,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 8 (1986): 31. 

40. MJ to Paulhan, April 3, 1925, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 100. MJ to Jouhandeau, April 6 and 17, 1925, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 184, 191. He eventually obtained the money from Émile-Paul. MJ, “Montmartre,” Tableaux de Paris (Paris: Émile-Paul, 1927).

41. MJ to Cocteau, May 1, 1925, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 270–72.

42. MJ to Cocteau, May 13, 1925, ibid., 288–89. He described Vinciguerra in more temperate terms to Kahnweiler: MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 290n4. A year later Jacob described Vinciguerra to Julien Lanoë as “meridional, loquacious, elegant, a bit countrified, and dim (just enough to be charming)” and noted that he came from a rich family. MJ to Julien Lanoë, May 4, 1926, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë.

43. MJ to Cocteau, May 16, 1925, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 290–91.

44. Descriptions of northern Italy: MJ to Cocteau, May 16, 1925, ibid., and MJ to de Gouy and Greeley, May 16, 1925, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:151. 

45. MJ to Frank, May 26, 1925, in MJ, Lettres à Frank, 89–90.

46. MJ to Jouhandeau, mid-April 1925, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 188. Jouhandeau obliged with a portrait that is almost a short story: Petit had a “forgettable” face, was pale, clean-shaven, bald, about thirty-five-years old, dressed austerely in official black, manner formal . . . and so forth. Jouhandeau, Lettres à Max Jacob, 69–71.

47. MJ to Cocteau, May 26, 1925, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 298.

48. MJ to Cocteau, June 1, 1925, ibid., 304–6.

49. Sophie Fishbach and Patricia Sustrac, “Max Jacob—Jules Supervielle, Correspondance croisée (1922–1935),” Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 13–14 (2013): 236. To Émié he wrote a long, mostly enthusiastic description of his Italian trip, especially praising the countryside around Rome, Florence, and Siena. Émié, Dialogues, 55–56. See also Hélène Henry’s article, an interview with Patricia Sustrac, about Jacob’s Italian trip and his perception of Italian Fascism: “Le Voyage en Italie de Max Jacob et le fascisme italien,” Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 9 (2009): 53–61.

50. MJ to Cocteau, June 18, 1925, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 316.

51. Andreu, Vie et mort, 181.

52. There has been some confusion about the dating of Jacob’s return from Italy. In her excellent articles “Dépêches italiennes I: Parcours,” in Max Jacob et la création, 135–43, and “Dépêches italiennes II: L’Inspiration,” in Max Jacob poète et romancier, ed. Christine Van Rogger Andreucci (Pau: Publications de l’Université de Pau, 1995), 257–62, Anne Kimball suggests that Jacob stayed only two or three days in Paris. But her later collection of the correspondence with Nino Frank makes it clear that Jacob stayed for eight days in Paris before returning to Saint-Benoît on July 3. MJ, Lettres à Frank, 95.

53. “St.-Benoît-la-Jaunisse”: MJ to Frank, July 20, 1925, in MJ, Lettres à Frank, 97. “St.-Benoît-le-Spleen”: MJ to Jouhandeau, August 13, 1925, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 209.

54. Bounoure recounted the visit in his essay “Pierre Reverdy et sa crise religieuse de 1925–27,” in Pierre Reverdy, 1880–1960 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1962), 204–12.

55. MJ to Cocteau, July 18, 1925, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 326. Claudel really had six children; his illegitimate daughter Louise Vetch would take refuge in Vézelay during World War II with her mother, Claudel’s early adulterous love, Rosalie Scibor-Rylska, and the two women eventually lived out their lives in the village and are buried there in the cemetery.

56. MJ to Jouhandeau, July 18, 1925, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 202.

57. MJ to Cocteau, August 13–September 23, 1925, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 338–51. MJ to Jouhandeau, August 13–October 8, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 209–33.

58. MJ to Jouhandeau, October 8, 1925, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 217.

59. He mentioned the book in a letter to Nino Frank on March 16, 1925, in MJ, Lettres à Frank, 79. To Paulhan, who worked for Gallimard, he wrote on April 3, 1925, that the book was “on sufferance, and suffering.” MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 100. To Salacrou on September 15, 1925, he called it “my inert novel.” MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou, 122. He would never finish the book.

60. MJ to Cocteau, October 4, 1925, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 352–53.

61. MJ to Jouhandeau, October 8, 1925, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 220.

62. MJ to Cocteau, October 4, 1925, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 352–53.

63. MJ to de Gouy and Greeley, October 16, 1925, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:157.

64. Philoctetes: MJ to Cocteau, October 13, 1925, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 355. Boy becoming a habit: MJ to Cocteau, August 22, 1925, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 342. Under Jacob’s tutelage, if such it could be called, Frenkel did go to confession and began to go to mass. He married in April 1926 and settled down to a conventional life as a businessman. MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 341n9.

65. Jouhandeau related this unhappy love years later in Carnets de l’écrivain (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 203–4. Du Breuil seems to have been quite a piece of work. In January, he sent a flirtatious letter to Jacob, who sent it immediately to Jouhandeau: MJ to Jouhandeau, January 1926, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 245–46. Du Breuil redeemed himself: he died fighting in the maquis in August 1944. Jean-Yves Debreuille, L’École de Rochefort: Théories et pratiques de la poésie 1941–1961 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1987), 52.

66. MJ to Jouhandeau, December 5, 1925, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 235–38. For Cocteau’s part in the affair, see his letter to Jacob of December 8 or 9, 1925, and Jacob’s reply in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 373, 374–77. Jouhandeau’s side of the story can be followed in Jouhandeau, Lettres à Max Jacob, 78–93. Jouhandeau seemed to derive a perverse satisfaction from analysis of his own twisted psyche: “If I’m violent and cruel, do I aspire to anything but goodness?” he wrote on November 2, 1925, and in early December he accused Jacob of having made a pimp of Cocteau and himself by crudely asking du Breuil for sex in order to degrade Cocteau. These sordid imbroglios are hardly interesting in themselves, but they show the raw material of Jouhandeau’s fiction, and more importantly, they help explain his later attacks on Jacob. 

67. MJ to Salacrou, October 19, 1925, in MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou, 130–31.

68. MJ, “Vision infernale en forme de madrigal,” PMR, in O, 702. Some of the poems in PMR had been published in Action, Les Feuilles libres, L’Oeuf dur, La Revue européenne, and Les Écrits nouveaux and included the ones originally dedicated to Leiris, Dubuffet, Poulenc, and Liane de Pougy.

69. See the chronology in O, 77.

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1. Henri Raczymow, Maurice Sachs ou Les travaux forcés de la frivolité (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 35.

2. Sachs, Sabbat, 29–41. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 31–41.

3. One can’t rely on Sachs’s memoirs for anything like the truth. His biographer Henri Raczymow presents the main lines of the story in Maurice Sachs ou Les travaux forcés de la frivolité. Sachs’s first memoir, The Decade of Illusion, published in English by Knopf in 1933 and translated by his provisional American wife, Gwladys Matthews Sachs, is a jumble of gossip about French artistic life cobbled together from lectures Sachs gave across the United States in 1931–32. One chapter is devoted to Max Jacob, presented as “the marvelous man with so large a heart, whom we will never love enough,” in Sachs, Décade, 220. La Décade de l’illusion (Paris: Gallimard, 1950) wasn’t published in France until after Sachs’s death. In 1935, Gallimard published his vicious roman à clef Alias, with its portrait of Jacob as a monstrous, lascivious Jew. In 1939, Sachs brought out a somewhat more honest portrayal of Paris in the 1920s in Au temps du Boeuf sur le toit (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1939). In the last years of his life (which ended with his spying for the Gestapo), he wrote more memoirs, studies in self-abasement and self-excusing, including Le Sabbat, souvenirs d’une jeunesse orageuse, composed in 1942 in Paris under the Occupation (Paris: Corrêa, 1946; reprinted Gallimard, 1960; translated by Richard Howard as Witches Sabbath [New York: Stein and Day, 1964]), and Chronique joyeuse et scandaleuse (Paris: Corrêa, 1948). 

4. Tual, Au Coeur, 74.

5. Sachs, Sabbat, 79. For details about Marie’s beauty regime, see Tual, Au Coeur, 72.

6. Sachs, Sabbat, 80.

7. Ibid., 78.

8. Ibid., 82–83.

9. Ibid., 89.

10. Ibid., 95.

11. Tual, Au Coeur, 73.

12. Sachs, Sabbat, 128, 122.

13. MJ, Lettres aux Salacrou, 140.

14. MJ to Robert delle Donne, January 6, 1926, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:159.

15. MJ to Jouhandeau, January 24, 1926, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 249.

16. MJ to Robert delle Donne, January 20, 1926, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:162–63.

17. MJ to Jouhandeau, January 18, 1926, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 244–45.

18. MJ to Sachs, January 18, 1926, in ms. 2579, Correspondence Max Jacob, Maurice Sachs, Médiathèque d’Orléans.

19. Later in his life, Jouhandeau was much more open about his sexual life, publishing a memoir in 1938, De l’abjection, in which he described luring workmen to his room and luxuriating in what he presented as “perversion.”

20. MJ to Jouhandeau, January 24, 1926, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 248. This tangled argument with Paul Petit and Jouhandeau about Jouhandeau’s alleged corruption continued for weeks, with Jacob trying to remain friendly and brush Petit’s meddling aside. Yet Jouhandeau was driven to reveal his secret life: his new novel Opales turned on the plot of a young man in love with both his male friend and the friend’s wife. When Jacob read the manuscript, he was disturbed at the openness of the passion confessed, advising, “In any case I fear a scandal and a blot on your beautiful reputation for severity. . . . Why don’t you publish it anonymously?” MJ to Jouhandeau, January 30, 1926, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 252–55.

21. MJ to Cocteau, January 25, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 381–83.

22. MJ to Cocteau, January 29, 1926, ibid., 386–89.

23. Ibid.

24. Marie-Claire Durand-Guiziou, “Max Jacob et l’Espagne: Introduction,” Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 7 (2007): 16. Notes for Jacob’s lecture would later be translated by the eminent writer José Bergamín and published in his journal Cruz y Raya in 1934; see MJ, “El verdadero sentido,” and “Las Plagas de Egipto.” Christine Van Rogger Andreucci gives an account of these articles in “Mise au point sur l’interprétation des Écritures par Max Jacob: De l’initiation à la charité chrétienne,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 4 (1981–82): 11–22. The French manuscript original for the first article, “Vrai sens de la religion catholique,” was discovered and published recently by Schmitt-Kummerlee, “Un manuscrit retrouvé.” A draft of the French original of “Las Plagas de Egipto y el Dolor” is preserved in the Bibliothèque Municipale d’Orléans, ms. 2271. Certain paragraphs may also be found in the manuscript “Notes diverses pour l’Anatomie religieuse,” ms. 8.140.3, BLJD.

25. The trip had been arranged by the scholar José Bergamín and Philippe Datz, a young insurance agent Jacob had met the year before in Milan. “Datz” was the nom de plume of Philippe Poidetz, a writer who had published a history of the Queen of Bavaria with the Nouvelle Revue Française, as well as occasional poems. Jacob wrote Cocteau from Italy of Datz’s essential, not just physical, beauty: MJ to Cocteau, June 25, 1925, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 320.

26. For comments on the Prado in Jacob’s Spanish notebook, see MJ, “Manuscrit,” ed. Francis Deguilly and Patricia Sustrac, Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 7 (2007): 48. On detachment from El Greco, see MJ to Cocteau, February 21, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 390–91.

27. MJ to Cocteau, February 21, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 390–91.

28. MJ, “Manuscrit,” 53.

29. MJ to Jacques Mezure, July 24, 1942, in MJ, Lettres à un jeune homme, 94–95. Quoted in Gilles Baudry, “Entre paradis et enfer, Max et son combat de Jacob,” in Max Jacob à la confluence, 94. Described also in MJ, “Manuscrit,” 55. Jacob’s accounts differ slightly. In the notes he took at the time, he says the ceremony of installing the bishop took place in the basilica above ground and that he knelt to receive the stolen blessing. Sixteen years later, writing to Mezure, he situated the story in the underground chapel and remembered prostrating himself fully on the ground.

30. MJ to Jacques Mezure, July 24, 1942, in MJ, Lettres à un jeune homme, 94–95.

31. Émié, Dialogues, 60–81.

32. MJ to Cocteau, February 21, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 390–92.

33. Émié, Dialogues, 65.

34. Ibid., 66.

35. Ibid., 70.

36. MJ to Cocteau, February 21, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 390–92.

37. Ibid.

38. MJ, Amitiés, 1:172–77.

39. MJ to Robert delle Donne, early March 1926, ibid., 172–73.

40. Victor Moremans, “Max Jacob, Les Pénitents en maillots roses,” Gazette de Liège, March 25, 1926.

41. Jean Cassou, “Les Pénitents en maillots roses, par Max Jacob,” Nouvelle Revue française 26, no. 152 (May 1926): 619.

42. Cocteau to MJ, May 2, 1925, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 274; MJ to Cocteau, May 1926, ibid., 414. Through Paulhan’s diplomacy, Jacob and Cassou eventually made friends.

43. André Fontainas, “Les Poèmes,” Mercure de France 188, no. 672 (June 15, 1926): 671–72. Guiette’s review celebrating “the juggler of the Sacred Heart” appeared in Sélection, no. 7 (April 1926).

44. MJ, “Un nouveau Cabinet noir”: “Lettre sans commentaires,” “Lettre de 1814 pour se plaindre d’un frère,” and “Lettre d’une bonne,” Nouvelle Revue française, no. 152 (May 1926): 526–36; CN, in O, 1022–26, 1030–31, 1043–44.

45. MJ, “Sur la foulure de mon poignet droit” (On Spraining My Right Wrist), and “Conseils” (Advice), Cahiers libres 4, no. 13 (May–June 1926): 3–4. He seems to have tossed off the poem about the wrist during his trip to Spain: “Je suis logé à Tolède / à l’Hôtel du Moindre Effort / Si tu ne viens à mon aide / j’y pends comme un hareng saur” (I’m staying in Toledo at / the Not the Least Effort Grand Hotel / if you don’t come to help me, well, / they’ll find me hanging like a sprat). 

46. He sometimes spelled Morven as Morwen. MJ, “Madrigal du diable ermite,” “Automne,” “Sommeil,” “Paysage,” “Censément traduit du Breton,” Commerce, no. 8 (Summer 1926): 63–71. “Censément traduit du Breton” appeared posthumously as “Jeanne Le Bolloch” in PMG, in O, 1665. For Lanoë’s account of the genesis of Morven, see Julien Lanoë, “Les Poèmes de Morven le Gaélique,” Le Mail, special no. 5 (April 1928): 258–60; and “Les Poèmes de Morven le Gaélique,” Simoun, no. 17–18 (1955): 45–48.

47. Maritain refers to Jacob as an exemplary poet in the second edition of Art et scolastique (Paris: Librairie de l’Art Catholique, 1927), Frontières de la poésie (Paris: Louis Rouart et Fils, 1935), and L’Intuition créatrice dans l’art et dans la poésie (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966).

48. MJ and Maritain, Correspondance, 24.

49. On September 8, 1926, Maritain added this statement to the revised edition of Art et scolastique: “Max Jacob judges that the work of poetry taking shape under the eyes of our contemporaries, which they hardly notice, prepares an artistic renaissance as serious as the arrival of Cimabue and Giotto.” MJ and Maritain, Correspondance, 19. At precisely this period, T. S. Eliot was befriending the officers of Action Française and Maritain (who had yet to separate from the group). See The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 3:186, 197.

50. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 123. Part came out in Le Roseau d’or, no. 2 (August 1926), and it was published as a book by Plon in 1926. It’s a symptom of the right-wing orientation of the group around Maritain at this period that Jacob’s splendid poem “Angoisses et autres” was followed by Massis’s article on Maurras.

51. The first stanza is scrawled in the notebook of his Spanish travels: MJ, “Manuscrit,” 57.

52. MJ, “Angoisses et autres,” Chroniques: Le Roseau d’or 2, no. 10 (1926): 44–45. In FE, in O, 1413–14, stanzas three and four are run together. There’s a variant in line 15, “je vais pleurer dans un bar” (I’m going to weep in a bar), instead of the later version, “je vais pleurer dans une barque” (I’m going to weep in a boat). I have translated the later version. The French has lines of seven syllables with a delicate variation in the last stanza (not reflected in the translation); what should be line 3 of the stanza, “ce soir avec tant d’amour,” has been broken into two lines, “ce soir / avec tant d’amour,” so that the stanza has six instead of five lines. Love for Jacob is a matter of breakage—the music of breakage. 

53. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 122.

54. Cocteau protested the thefts in Lettre Plainte and Journal d’un Inconnu (Paris: Grasset, 1953), 102–3. Razcymow, Maurice Sachs, 93, 147. Steegmuller presents excerpts from Lettre Plainte, Cocteau’s letter to the publisher Roland Saucier in 1926: Steegmuller, Cocteau, 521.

55. MJ to Robert delle Donne, c. mid-March 1926, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:173–74.

56. Sachs, Sabbat, 135–36.

57. Ibid., 138. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 119.

58. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 382.

59. MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 417n4.

60. MJ to Cocteau, May 1926, ibid., 414–17.

61. MJ and Maritain, Correspondance, 39–41.

62. MJ to Cocteau, May 16, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 419–20.

63. MJ to Cocteau, July 8 and 19, 1926, ibid., 430, 435. Cocteau to MJ, c. March 1926, ibid., 402–4. MJ to Robert delle Donne, May 12, 1926, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:184.

64. MJ to Robert delle Donne, c. early June 1926, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:185.

65. MJ to Cocteau, March 8, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 400–401. He half-apologized to “Pablo” for missing his show in a joint letter in early August to him, Sachs, Cocteau, and François de Gouy, who were all at Juan-les-Pins. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 201.

66. MJ to Cocteau, July 8, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 429–31. Liane describes the drama in her memoirs: Pougy, Mes cahiers, 226–39.

67. Sachs, Sabbat, 141–43. In Sachs’s account, the physical consummation of the boys’ affair led to nothing but “an atrocious despair,” and Sachs left the next day for Paris. In fact, the whole drama took weeks to play out, and glee, not despair, was the emotion they displayed. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 128–30.

68. Sachs, Sabbat, 143.

69. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 203.

70. MJ to Jouhandeau, August 26, 1926, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 266.

71. MJ to Cocteau, September 24, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 441–43.

72. Louis Guilloux, Absent de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 146–87.

73. Ibid., 152.

74. Jacob wrote Cocteau that a piece Guilloux read to him was “so dramatic and pathetic, it equals Dostoevski.” MJ to Cocteau, September 24, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 441–43.

75. Guilloux, Absent, 154.

76. Ibid., 157.

77. Ibid., 175–78.

78. MJ to Cocteau, September 24, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 441.

79. MJ to Cocteau, November 22, 1926, ibid., 454–56. Pougy, Mes cahiers, 229–37.

80. MJ to Robert delle Donne, October 2 and 7, 1926, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:191–93. 

81. MJ to Kahnweiler, November 4, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 444n1.

82. Jacob’s letters to Sachs are in ms. 2579 in the Médiathèque of Orléans. 

83. MJ to Jouhandeau, October 7, 1926, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 274–75.

84. MJ to Cocteau, c. November 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 458–61.

85. Sachs, Sabbat, 149.

86. Ibid., 145.

87. Ibid., 145–47.

88. Maurice Sachs, Alias (1935; reprinted Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 186. Why, one wonders, would Gallimard have printed such garbage?

89. Already at age sixteen in Paris, Sachs had exploited an older writer’s lust. This was the academician Abel Hermant, whom Sachs had met at the salon of his great grandmother, Madame Straus, Georges Bizet’s widow. Chronique joyeuse et scandaleuse gives a disgusting portrait of this “hairy baby,” from whom Sachs stole: Sachs, Chronique, 21–25. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 64–68.

90. Sachs relates a sanitized version of this adventure in Décade, 207–22, and with more detail and nastiness in Alias, 210–19. See also Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 136–38. As usual, Sachs’s narrative is not to be trusted. Joseph Pérard describes his first meeting with Jacob and the development of their friendship in affectionate and respectful terms in his book Max Jacob l’universel (Colmar: Éditions Alsatia Colmar, 1974), 8–9. Pérard spent his last years as a professor in a Catholic lycée in the Drôme.

91. He was wearing the same outfit a few days later in Bordeaux, as can be seen in the photograph with Louis Émié, Jean-Loup Simian, and Jacob: Andreu, Vie et mort, 96. At that point, Sachs was still rather thin; he later became bloated with alcohol. 

92. Jouhandeau’s account is from his Carnets de l’écrivain (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 316. Quoted in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 281. Véronique was a character in Jouhandeau’s new novel Monsieur Godeau intime and the heroine in Sachs’s story. Jacob defended Sachs in a letter to Jouhandeau on November 2, 1926, and a few days later apologized for bringing him to visit: “When I brought Maurice Sachs to you, I had no idea that you had already met socially. Excuse me! I’ll never bring anyone else, I promise.” MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 278–83. See also MJ to Cocteau, November 22, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 454–56.

93. MJ to Jouhandeau, November 2, 1926, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 278–80.

94. Sachs, Décade, 213.

95. Émié, Dialogues, 92. The article appeared in La Revue nouvelle, February 15, 1927, and infuriated Jouhandeau, who cut off communication with Jacob for months. MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 292.

96. FE, in O, 1409.

97. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 142–43.

98. MJ to Cocteau, November 14, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 449–53. Jacob also showed some of the poems to Jouhandeau. See MJ to Jouhandeau, October 7, 1926, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 274–76.

99. MJ to Maritain, November 4, 1926, in MJ and Maritain, Correspondance, 44–45.

100. MJ to Maritain, December 7 and 10, 1926, ibid., 46–48.

101. MJ to Robert delle Donne, November 12, 1926, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:193–95.

102. MJ to Cocteau, November 14, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 449–51. 

103. MJ to Cocteau, c. November 1926, ibid., 456–61.

104. Cocteau to MJ, November 20, 1926, ibid., 453–54. MJ to Cocteau, November 22, 1926, ibid., 454–56. 

105. MJ to Sachs, November 24, 1926, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

106. MJ to Sachs, December 2, 1926, ibid.

107. MJ to Sachs, December 8, 1926, ibid.

108. MJ to Robert delle Donne, November 12, 1926, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:193–94.

109. Ottoni caring for Jacob: MJ to Cocteau, January 15, 1927, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 481. Vaillant’s women: MJ to Cocteau, c. November 1926, ibid., 458–61. See also MJ to Sachs, November 24, 1926, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

110. MJ to Cocteau, December 27, 1926, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 466–68.

111. MJ to Cocteau, December 29, 1926, ibid., 471–73. He was released two months later, but it’s not clear on whose intervention.

112. MJ to the Neveus, December 27, 1926, in ms. n. acq. fr. 16799, n. 26, BnF.

113. MJ to Jouhandeau, January 7, 1927, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 287–89.

114. MJ and Maritain, Correspondance, 48–51.

115. MJ, “Allégorie,” “Ils attendant le voyageur,” and “Paysage mobile,” Nouvelle Revue française, no. 159 (December 1926): 697–99. MJ, “Allégorie,” PMG, in O, 1659.

116. MJ, “La Nuit,” “Sur la mort,” “Méditation,” “Changement de temps,” “Un Chapeau d’instituteur,” and “Le Phare d’Eckmühl,” Ligne de coeur 3, no. 8 (January 15, 1927): 16–18. MJ, “La Nuit,” “Sur la mort,” and “Méditation,” FE, in O, 1422, 1411, 1423. MJ, “Un Chapeau d’instituteur” and “Le Phare d’Eckmühl,” PMG, in O, 1619, 1618. There’s an error in the bibliography by Green and Andreucci. The poem “La Nuit” is not the same as “Nuit.” The latter was published in La Revue nouvelle in January 1927. Both “La Nuit” and “Nuit” appeared in FE. In the 1991 Gallimard edition of Ballades, which includes FE, the last two stanzas of “La Nuit” were placed in the poem following it, “Méditation.” Rodriguez restores the text in O, 1790n9.

117. The series includes work by Reverdy, Cocteau, and Soupault. Jacob wrote Paulhan at the Nouvelle Revue Française publishing house for permission to publish the poems with Laporte, since he was having so much trouble with Gallimard. Permission was readily granted. MJ to Paulhan, February 7 and 15, 1927, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 121–22.

118. Salmon, Jacob, poète, 17.

119. Ibid., 28.

120. MJ to Fillacier, July 26, 1927, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 283. Jacob would warn his friend and patron Louis Dumoulin against Carco. MJ to Dumoulin, December 3, 1940, in Max Jacob écrit, 197.

121. Robert Levesque, “Journal: Trois jours à Saint-Benoît (avec Max Jacob),” Nouvelle Revue française, no. 292 (April 1977): 30–36. Levesque became a lycée professor of literature and philosophy, teaching in Greece from 1938 to 1948, and then in Morocco until 1968. Modest, self-effacing, and devoted, he wrote a hagiographical portrait of Gide and translated the modern Greek poets. Robert Levesque, Lettre à Gide (Lyon: Centre d’Études Gidiennnes, 1982). Jacob’s letters to him are published in Une Amitié de Max Jacob: Lettres de Max Jacob à Robert Levesque, ed. Pierre Masson (Mortemart: Rougerie, 1994).

122. Jacob wrote Jouhandeau placatingly about Levesque on January 17 and 19 and on March 11, 1927, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 287–94. He warned Levesque in a letter dated February 23, 1927, in MJ, Lettres à Levesque, 24.

123. On March 25, Jacob wrote him: “Dear Marcel, Your letters slim down to annihilation or annihilate themselves to slimness.” MJ to Jouhandeau, March 25, 1927, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 295. To Cocteau, he reported: “Mortal silence from Jouhandeau,” MJ to Cocteau, April 17, 1927, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 532–34.

124. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 206. The letter was printed as “Une lettre de Max Jacob à Robert Lévesque,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 6 (1984): 59–62. It is now in the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris and contains a sketch of Picasso’s cross-hatched drawing of a proto-Cubist head.

125. MJ, “Souvenirs sur Picasso,” 199–202. The article was illustrated with photographs of Picasso in 1901 and 1912, as well as with reproductions of his recent paintings and drawings.

126. Sachs, Sabbat, 156–57. The novel would be a short story, “Alphonse,” about a young man’s resurrection. He sent it to Jacques Bonjean and asked Marie Laurencin to illustrate it. It was printed in 1952 in the journal Arts.

127. MJ to Sachs, January 3, 1927, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

128. MJ to Sachs, January 17, 1927, ibid.

129. MJ to Sachs, February 16, 1927, ibid.

130. MJ to Sachs, February 27, 1927, ibid.

131. MJ to Sachs, February 16, 1927, ibid.

132. MJ to Sachs, March 3, 1927, ibid.

133. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 382.

134. Cocteau to MJ, c. April 1927, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 524–25.

135. MJ to Cocteau, April 12, 1927, ibid., 526–29.

136. MJ to Cocteau, March 23, 1927, ibid., 517.

137. Cocteau to MJ, April 27, 1927, ibid., 530.

138. Victor Moremans, “Max Jacob, Fond de l’eau,” Gazette de Liège, June 9, 1927.

139. Robert Guiette, “Max Jacob, Fond de l’eau,” Échantillons, January 1928.

140. MJ to Sachs, March 24, 1927, in ms. 2579, Orléans. MJ to Cocteau, March 22, 1927, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 515–17.

141. Cocteau to MJ, c. April 1927, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 524–25.

142. Belaval, Rencontre, 22–24.

143. MJ to Cocteau, April 27, 1927, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 532–34. Belaval wrote an endearing, perceptive book about Jacob, full of quoted letters and meditations, La Rencontre avec Max Jacob. He was also one of the few people to remain loyal to Sachs, and it was through his efforts that many of Sachs’s works appeared posthumously. 

144. Florent Fels, “Max Jacob, Peintre et poète,” Nouvelles littéraires, April 30, 1927, 1.

145. Cocteau to MJ, c. April 1927, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 531.

146. MJ to Cocteau, February 26, 1927, ibid., 499–501.

147. MJ to Sachs, March 24, 1927, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

148. MJ to Sachs, c. late March 1927, ibid.

149. MJ to Sachs, April 6, 1927, ibid.

150. MJ to Sachs, May 4 and 19, 1927, ibid.

151. MJ to Laporte, May 9, 1927, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:208. MJ to Maritain, May 17, 1927, in MJ and Maritain, Correspondance, 48–49. MJ to Cocteau, May 21, 1927, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 537. MJ to Lanoë, May 29, 1927, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 114.

152. MJ to Sachs, May 24, 1927, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

153. MJ to Sachs, June 4, 1927, ibid.

154. The Daudet drama came to a crisis two days later. Chiappe surrounded the offices of Action française with two thousand policemen and Republican Guards and early in the morning of June 13 persuaded Daudet not to shed French blood. Daudet surrendered and the camelots du roi were allowed to march out in military formation and go home unmolested. Daudet went to prison but escaped two weeks later. The story is dramatically recounted by Chiappe’s lieutenant, Lucien Zimmer, in his memoir Un Septennat policier (Paris: Fayard, 1967), 11–23.

155. Marie-Laure de Noailles, née Marie-Laure Bischoffsheim, was the granddaughter of a friend of Cocteau’s mother, the Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigny, born Laure de Sade, whom Proust transformed into La Duchesse de Guermantes. Marie-Laure’s husband, the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, came from a different branch of the family from Cocteau’s early friend the Comtesse Anna de Noailles. Marie-Laure and Charles were generous patrons of avant-garde art. 

156. MJ to Cocteau, July 5, 1927, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 548–49.

157. MJ to Pougy, June 21, 1927, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 91.

158. Sachs, Décade, 216.

159. Ibid., 216–17.

160. Jacob mentions the visit in letters to Fillacier, July 26, 1927, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 283; to Liane, July 8, 1927, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 92; to Jean Cassou, September 13, 1927, in Max Jacob écrit, 124; and to Lanoë, July 14, 1927, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 122. The letter to Cassou makes it clear that they visited Solesmes after Bréhat. Jacob, Sachs, and Reverdy sent a communal postcard to Lanoë. 

161. Sachs, Alias, 204.

162. On July 21, Jacob wrote Sachs at Bréhat with greetings to his grandmother and the Osterlinds. Ms. 2579, Orléans.

163. MJ to Sachs, July 21, 1927, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

164. From Quimper on July 14, he sent “La fille des fontaines,” “Chanson du clerc,” and “Plaintes d’un mort.” The first two would appear in La Ligne de coeur in November and later in PMG, in O, 1617. MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 93–95.

165. The Colles’ handsome house with its large walled garden and towering pines still stands on a narrow street corner on a hill over the Bay of Douarnenez, at 46 Allée de Kerlien. There is a plaque commemorating Max Jacob on its outer wall. 

166. Sachs, Sabbat, 158–59.

167. Ibid., 163–67.

168. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 159–60. Sachs solicited work from Cocteau, Maritain, Gide, Julien Green, Reverdy, and others. Not much else would see the light of day under the imprint “Collection Maurice Sachs,” but Cocteau’s Le Mystère laïc came out in April, followed by Cocteau’s anonymous homosexual confession novel, Le Livre blanc.

169. Sachs, Sabbat, 168.

170. MJ to Sachs, July 2, 1927, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

171. MJ to Sachs, c. August 1927, ibid.

172. MJ to Cocteau, August 20, 1927, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 554. MJ to Sachs, from Roscoff, c. September 1927, in ms. 2579, Orléans. 

173. MJ to Cocteau, October 16, 1927, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 557. MJ to Sachs, October 19, 1927, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

174. MJ to Sachs, October 30, 1927, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

175. MJ to Cocteau, October 13, 1927, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 553–54.

176. MJ to Cocteau, October 1927, ibid., 555–56.

177. Ibid., 557.

178. Sachs, Décade, 219.

179. MJ to Cocteau, August 20, 1927, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 551–53.

180. Jouhandeau described the gift of the drawing in Carnets de l’écrivain, 315–16.

181. MJ to Sachs, December 8, 1927, in ms. 2579, Orléans. Cocteau called the Princesse Murat “the monster.” She was a lesbian opium addict who had recently taken up with Jeanne Bourgoint, the beautiful, wayward sister of Cocteau’s other “Jean,” Jean Bourgoint. The brother and sister, who lived in eerie intimacy in a single messy room, became the models for the pair in Cocteau’s novel Les Enfants terribles. Jeanne eventually died by suicide; Jean became a monk. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 387.

182. MJ to Level, March 26, 1927, in ms. 8491-9 to 8491-23, BLJD.

183. Nicholas Nabokov (as his name is written in English) was a noted composer, in exile from the Soviet Union like his cousin, the novelist Vladimir Nabokov.

184. MJ to Pougy, c. December 1927, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 97–98. MJ to Sachs, December 8, 1927, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

185. Sachs, Sabbat, 24.

186. MJ to Sachs, December 15, 1927, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

187. MJ to Sachs, January 23, 1928, ibid.

188. “Revue de la Quinzaine,” Mercure de France, December 15, 1927, 664–65.

189. MJ to Level, February 8, 1928, in ms. 22, Fonds Max Jacob, Médiathèque des Ursulines, Quimper.

190. MJ to Sachs, February 15, 1928, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

191. Ibid.

192. MJ to Sachs, January 16, 1928, ibid.

193. In April 1927, he wrote Tristan Dérême, “I haven’t written even the first line of a novel Gallimard has announced.” Palacio, “Max Jacob 2,” 280.

194. Paulhan to MJ, c. February 1927, January 17 and 18, 1928, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 130–33.

195. MJ to Sachs, January 23, 1928, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

196. MJ to Gaudier, February 8, 1928, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 297.

197. MJ to Cocteau, March 3, 1928, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 563–65.

198. MJ, “Fête de la Très Sainte Vierge,” “Genveur l’ivrogne,” Marie Kerloch,” “Noces de Cana,” Ligne de coeur 3, no. 10 (June 1927): 12–16; PMG, in O, 1636, 1625, 1624, 1635. MJ, “Chanson de clerc,” “La Fille de fontaine,” “Mon chien noir,” Ligne de coeur 3, no. 11 (November 1927): 3–5; PMG, in O, 1617, 1632. And MJ, “Tentations de l’esprit,” Ligne de coeur 3, no. 11 (November 1927): 35.

199. MJ, “Les conscrits,” “Veille des cataclysms,” “Le Tailleur maigre,” “Baptême,” “Demande en marriage,” and “Juliette Gallic,” Revue européenne, January–February 1928, 61–66. MJ, “Demande en marriage” PMG, in O, 1678.

200. Jean Cassou, “Max Jacob et la liberté,” Nouvelle Revue française, no. 175 (April 1928): 454–63.

201. Jean Cassou, “Max Jacob parmi nous,” Le Mail, special no. 5 (April 1928): 241–42. Woodcuts by Louis-Joseph Soulas.

202. Louis Thomas, “Max Jacob,” Nouvelles littéraires, March 17, 1927, 5.

203. MJ to Cocteau, March 3, 1928, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 563–65.

204. Sachs, Sabbat, 169–70. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 160–61.

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1. MJ to Frank, c. April 1928, in MJ, Lettres à Frank, 144.

2. MJ to Paulhan, April 19, 1928, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 134.

3. MJ to Sachs, April 27, 1928, in ms. 2579, Orléans. The note is addressed to plural “dears,” probably including Pierre Colle, who was joining forces with Sachs in art dealing, or it may have referred to Sachs and Bonjean. The note mentions Sauguet “at the American dentist's”: the composer, a protégé of Satie’s, rented a room from a dental surgeon who was a friend of Satie’s parents. Henri Sauguet, “Max Jacob et la musique,” Revue Musicale, no. 210 (January 1952): 153. Christian Bérard was Cocteau’s friend “Bébé,” the fashionable painter and set designer.

4. MJ to Sachs, May 5, 1928, in ms. 2579, Orléans. 

5. Sachs, Sabbat, 193–201.

6. MJ to Paulhan, April 1928, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 137.

7. Émié, Dialogues, 130.

8. Henri Sauguet, interview by author. The detail about dressing in drag comes from a letter from Vittorio Rieti to his wife Elsie Rieti, dated November 21, 1930: Rieti decribes Sauguet in a red dress, pearls, and face powder “as usual.” Letter in the archive of Rieti’s son Fabio Rieti.

9. Sauguet, “Max Jacob et la musique,” 151.

10. MJ to Paulhan, May 17, 1928, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 138.

11. Tracol became a journalist working for the magazine Vue and, through Lavastine, a devotee of Gurdjieff. In the early 1930s, he was close to Sachs, whom he found “amusing,” with “a gift for using other people.” Interview by author.

12. MJ to Lanoë, May 26, 1928, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 159.

13. Frank, “Retour de Saint-Benoît de Max Jacob,” in “Malles et Valises,” Nouvelles littéraires, April 28, 1928.

14. “Oeuvres originales et graphiques de quatorze peintres contemporains,” in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 135.

15. Robert Guiette, “Notes pour un portrait,” Disque vert 2, no. 2 (November 1923): 53–55.

16. Guiette, Vie, 11. The full correspondence, ranging from 1923 to 1940, has been published: MJ, Lettres à Robert Guiette, ed. Michel Décaudin (Paris: Éditions des Cendres, 1996).

17. Guiette, Vie, 13.

18. The book itself didn’t appear until 1976, but the chapters in the journal became a source for many later studies.

19. Guiette, Vie, 21–22.

20. Jean Desbordes, J’adore (Paris: Grasset, 1928), 16. By an odd coincidence, J’adore was the one book Virginia Woolf purchased on her excursion to France in September 1928 with her lover Vita Sackville-West. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Random House, 1996), 509.

21. Desbordes, J’adore, 41.

22. Ibid., 5.

23. Ibid., 9.

24. Maritain to MJ, June 30, 1928, in MJ and Maritain, Correspondance, 57.

25. MJ to Maritain, June 25, 1928, ibid., 56.

26. MJ to Maritain, July 9, 1928, ibid., 58.

27. Ibid., 58.

28. MJ, “Courrier littéraire,” Nouvelles littéraires, August 1, 1928, 113, reprinted in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 615.

29. MJ and Maritain, Correspondance, 59n3.

30. MJ to Pierre Reverdy, July 9, 1928, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 303.

31. MJ to Sachs, July 13, 1928, in ms. 2579, Orléans. The text of the ditty in French: “Philippe en maillot noir / montre ses bras en or / et du matin au soir / brille comme un ostensoir.”

32. MJ to Sachs, August 13, 1928, ibid.

33. MJ to Sachs, August 30, 1928, ibid. Lavastine was evidently a rather decadent character at this stage; in November, Jacob wrote Julien Lanoë that Philippe was in trouble with the law for being mixed up in the sale of cocaine.

34. MJ to Roger Karl, August 30, 1928, in MJ, “Lettres à Roger Karl,” Lettre ouverte 5 (March 1961): 61–63. The art dealer was probably the patient André Level at the Galerie Percier, with whom Jacob remained friendly.

35. MJ to Sachs, September 16, 1928, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

36. MJ to Sachs and Colle, September 21, 1928, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

37. Sachs’s biographer Henri Raczymow states, “Sachs and Colle conceived the idea of bringing Max Jacob to Paris. They went to pick him up at Saint-Benoît in the car they borrowed from Jean Desbordes and they installed him in the Hôtel Nollet.” Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 168. But Jacob moved to Paris on his own in April 1928, several days before Sachs’s return from the army, and he stayed at the Ermitage du Régent, not at the Hôtel Nollet. Later in the year, Sachs and Colle borrowed Desbordes’s car and drove Jacob back to Saint-Benoît to pick up the last of his belongings. See Sachs, Décade, 219.

38. Andreu, Vie et mort, 214–15. MJ to Sachs and Colle, c. October 1928, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

39. MJ to Cocteau, October 31, 1928, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 566–68.

40. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 168–70.

41. Sachs, Sabbat, 206–7.

42. Ibid., 204–5.

43. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 214. The next year, Jacob sold the drawing to the collector André Lefèvre, who often allowed it to be reproduced.

44. Théophile Briant, “Itinéraires de Max Jacob,” Goéland, August 1946.

45. MJ to Sachs, December 14, 1928, in ms. 2579, Orléans. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 173.

46. Élise Jouhandeau, Le Spleen empanaché: Joies et douleurs d’une belle excentrique (Paris: Flammarion, 1960), 157.

47. MJ to Jouhandeau, November 20 and 27–29, 1928, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 320–21.

48. The scene of the proposal: Élise Jouhandeau, Le Lien de ronces, ou le marriage (Paris: Grasset, 1964), 36–39. Jacob’s escape: ibid., 123.

49. Raczymow is mistaken in his claim that Sachs “introduced” Reverdy to Chanel. They had had a serious romance from 1921 to 1924.

50. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 172–73.

51. MJ to Sachs, February 15, 1929, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

52. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 175.

53. Ibid. 

54. Ibid., 211–14.

55. MJ to Charles Goldblatt, April 27, 1929, in MJ, L’Amitié: Lettres à Charles Goldblatt, ed. André Roumieux (Paris: Le Castor Astral, 1994), 67–68.

56. MJ, “Pour mes nouveaux jeunes amis,” Courte Paille 1, no. 1 (March 1929): 22–23. MJ, “Bélisaire,” Courte Paille 1, no. 2 (April 1929): n.p.; AE, 146.

57. Pierre Andreu, Le Rouge et le blanc (Paris: Table Ronde, 1977), 68–77.

58. Maurice Sachs, Au temps du Boeuf sur le Toit (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1939), 230–31.

59. MJ to François de Gouy, April 12, 1929, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:238.

60. MJ to Cocteau, May 23, 1929, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 570.

61. Victor Moremans, “Max Jacob: Le Cabinet noir,” Gazette de Liège, January 3, 1929.

62. MJ to Moremans, January 1929, in Lambert Joassin, “L’amitié de Max Jacob et de Victor Moremans,” Marginales, no. 107–8 (June–July 1966): 41.

63. Jean Cassou, “Poésie: Max Jacob, Cinématoma,” Nouvelles littéraires, July 27, 1929.

64. MJ, “La Gourmandise,” Les Sept péchés capitaux (Paris: Éditions Kra, 1929), 115–46.

65. Morven le Gaélique, “Poèmes,” Commerce, no. 22 (Winter 1929): 7–43. All these poems were later included in the posthumous PMG. “La Petite servante,” in O, 1628. Poulenc set “La Petite servante” to music in December 1931: “Cinq Poèmes de Max Jacob.”

66. MJ, “Description de l’extase” and “Poète et peintre,” Raison d’être 2, no. 2 (February 1929): 7. “Description de l’extase” in SI, in O, 1433, and “Poète et peintre” in AE, 246. MJ, “Marine” and “Les Pneus gelés,” Jazz, no. 15 (February 1929): 109–10, in AE, 203, 236. The new tone is audible, also, in the poems for La Courte Paille. In “Bélisaire,” Jacob hit the right balance between nonsense and elegance: “I leave an Empire in the night.” MJ, “À propos du jugement dernier,” Feuillets inutiles, no. 1 (Spring 1929), in AE, 143.

67. Charles-Albert Cingria, Ossianide (October–November 1949), 84; quoted in Françoise Steel-Coquet, “Christopher Wood and France,” in Christopher Wood: A Painter between Two Cornwalls, ed. André Cariou and Michael Tooby (London: Tate Gallery, 1996), 13.

68. MJ to Picasso, August 25, 1929, in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 216.

69. Accounts of the accident: MJ to Fillacier, November 1929, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 317–18; MJ to Paulhan, September 21, 1929, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 140; MJ to the Ghikas, October 6, 1929, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 100–101.

70. MJ to Maritain, September 22, 1929, in MJ and Maritain, Correspondance, 61–62.

71. MJ to Robert delle Donne, October 28, 1929, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:245.

72. MJ to Sachs, November 1929, in ms. 2579, Orléans. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 176.

73. MJ to Paulhan, November 12, 1929, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 144.

74. MJ to Kit Wood, September 18, 1929, in Françoise Coquet, “Portraits d’amis: Max Jacob et Kit Wood en Bretagne,” Adam, International Review, no. 487–92 (1988): 48.

75. MJ to Fillacier, September 27, 1929, in Fillacier, Chante cigale, 330.

76. MJ to Robert delle Donne, October 30, 1929, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:247–49.

77. Béhar, Breton, 217. MJ, Lettres à Pierre Minet, ed. Anne Kimball (Quimper: Calligrammes, 1988), 16.

78. MJ to René Gaudier, February 4, 1925, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 238. Gaudier had married Minet’s elder sister.

79. Joseph Daoust, “Causerie sur les revues,” Esprit et vie, September 13, 1984, 489–94. 

80. MJ to Paulhan, c. December 1929, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 147.

81. MJ to Minet, January 8, 1930, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 33.

82. Gertrude Stein, Morceaux choisis de La Fabrication des Américains: Histoire du progrès d’une famille, trans. Georges Hugnet (Paris: Éditions de la Montagne, 1929). Hugnet ran Éditions de la Montagne with financial support from his father.

83. MJ to Stein, December 6, 1929, in Annette Thau, “Max Jacob’s Letters to Gertrude Stein: A Critical Study,” Folio, no. spec. 9 (October 1976): 47–54.

84. René Villard, “Max Jacob à Quimper: Histoire d’une classe de lycée,” Correspondant, new ser. 282 (January 10, 1930): 76–97.

85. MJ to Villard, in MJ, Lettres à Villard, 35–36.

86. MJ to Sachs, January 26, 1930, in ms. 2579, Orléans.

87. MJ to Sachs, February 3, 1930, ibid.

88. MJ to François de Gouy, February 24, 1930, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 327.

89. MJ to Minet, February 26, 1930, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 34–35.

90. Morven Le Gaélique, “Poèmes,” Nouvelle Revue française, no. 203 (August 1930): 166–69. MJ, “Au Marché,” “Le Mariage,” “Chanson du berger,” “Jeunes filles modernes à Douarnenez,” PMG, in O, 1639, 1638, 1668, 1640.

91. MJ to Minet, March 12, 1930, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 36–37.

92. MJ to Ferrare, April 22, 1930, in MJ, “Lettres à Henri Ferrare, 1929–1934,” ed. René Plantier, Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 1 (1978): 63.

93. MJ to Minet, c. summer 1930, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 46.

94. MJ to Minet, June 2, 1930, ibid., 42–43.

95. MJ to Maillols, July 22, 1930, from Ty-Mad, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:256.

96. MJ to Ferrare, June 14, 1930, in MJ, “Lettres à Ferrare,” 66.

97. Charles-Albert Cingria, “Survie de Max Jacob,” Labyrinthe, no. 1 (October 15, 1944): 85.

98. The hotel is still in business, and just behind the sober little church a plaque commemorates Max Jacob.

99. Cingria, “Survie de Max Jacob,” 85. Pascin had trapped himself painting society portraits. One of the hardest livers and hardest drinkers in the wild crowd in Montparnasse, he died by suicide after slitting his wrists and hanging himself from a doorknob. He inscribed his farewell to his main lover, Lucie Krogh, in blood on the door: “Adieu Lucie.” Klüver and Martin, Kiki’s Paris, 205.

100. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 182.

101. She was there on July 8, however, when Jacob wrote Cingria that “Kit Wood and the lady in black love you and admire you,” in MJ, Amitiés, 1:254.

102. Steel-Coquet, “Christopher Wood and France,” 20.

103. Coquet, “Portraits d’amis,” 47. Wood painted Jacob, seated and leaning forward from an angle slightly above him: Jacob looks like a stocky dignified leprechaun. The painting is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Quimper.

104. Cocteau to MJ, c. summer 1930, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 574.

105. MJ to Maritain, May 22 and August 10, 1930, in MJ and Maritain, Correspondance, 64–65.

106. Minet to Lilian, August 8, 1930, and MJ to Minet, August 3, 1930, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 48–49.

107. MJ to Minet, September 5 and 12, 1930, ibid., 50–51.

108. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 182.

109. Ibid. 

110. Ibid., 184. Date of departure: Philippe Schmitt-Kummerlee, Max Jacob au Grand Quartier general Nollet (Paris: Al Manar, 2007), 36.

111. MJ to Minet, September 5 and 12, 1930, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 50–51. MJ to Cingria, c. October 1930, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:259. MJ to Goldblatt, September 16, 1930, in MJ, Lettres à Goldblatt, 78. MJ to de Gouy, January 2, 1931, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:261. MJ to Jean Colle, c. fall 1930, in MJ, Lettres à Jean Colle, ed. Sylvia Lorant-Colle and Maurice Dirou (Douarnenez: Mémoire de la Ville, 1996), 25.

112. MJ to Froska Munster, October 10, 1930, in Coquet, “Portraits d’amis,” 49.

113. It’s not clear if Jacob was present for his brother’s funeral, but it seems likely that he attended. There’s little mention of it in his correspondence. On October 8, he wrote the Ghikas about the uncertainty of his plans due to his brother’s approaching death, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 337. He wrote Jean Colle, while grieving for Kit Wood, that he had also lost an older brother: “We’re not laughing anymore,” in MJ, Lettres à Colle, 25.

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1. Stein’s portraits: Thau, “Letters to Gertrude Stein,” 50–51. Chapters of Olivier’s memoir appeared in Le Soir and Mercure de France in 1931. Olivier would collect these pieces in 1933 in the book Picasso et ses amis.

2. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 220. The account of the evening was written by Sylvette Fillacier’s new companion, soon to be her husband, Pierre Lazareff: “Le retour de Max Jacob a été fêté au cours d’une nuit parisienne,” Paris-Midi, December 5, 1930, 2.

3. Vittorio Rieti, interview by author.

4. Ibid. The detail about the pianos is from a letter dated December 13, 1930, from Vittorio Rieti to his wife Elsie Rieti (who lived in Rome). The letters from Vittorio Rieti to Elsie Rieti are in the possession of their son, the artist Fabio Rieti, who has kindly made them available.

5. Rieti simply calls him “Boris,” but it must be Kochno, Diaghilev’s collaborator

who wrote libretti for Sauguet, Stravinski, and Auric. 

6. Scene described in a letter from Vittorio Rieti to Elsie Rieti, dated November 21, 1930, courtesy Fabio Rieti.

7. Rieti interview. Vittorio Rieti, Quatre Poèmes de Max Jacob (Hastings-on-Hudson: General Music Publishing, 1975). The four poems are “La Crise,” “Le Noyer fatal,” “Soir d’été,” and “Monsieur le Duc.” “Monsieur le Duc” is particularly absurd and sarcastic, with teasing gender confusions: “Le Duc dit: Veuillez m’excuser, / Je ne suis pas homme, je ne suis pas femme, / Le Duc dit; Veuillez m’excuser, / Je ne suis pas femme, je suis nouveau-né” (The Duke says, please excuse me: / I’m not a man, I’m not a woman, /The Duke says, please excuse me: / I’m not a woman, I’m a new-born”). “Le Noyer fatal” was reprinted in AE, 223. Rieti’s songs are beautiful, strange examples of the French art song and should be brought back into the repertoire. 

8. MJ, “Stabat Mater” is one of the Morven poems, first published in Commerce, no. 22, (Winter 1929); PMG, in O, 1637.

9. MJ to François de Gouy, January 2, 1931, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:260–61. He also wrote about Markevitch to a recent friend, the poet–traveling salesman–insurance agent Bernard Esdras-Gosse: MJ, Lettres à Bernard Esdras-Gosse (Paris: Seghers, 1953), 21–22. Markevitch recalled his friendship with Jacob in his memoir Être et avoir été (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 226–27, including an episode of Jacob’s suddenly pressing against him to rush to orgasm. 

10. Rieti interview.

11. MJ to Minet, February 26, 1931, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 55–59.

12. See Minet’s description in his diary, ibid., 20.

13. MJ to Minet, March 1, 1931, ibid., 60–61.

14. MJ, “Allusions romantiques à propos du Mardi-Gras,” LC, in O, 595.

15. MJ to Minet, April 3 and 6, 1931, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 66–67.

16. Vittorio Rieti to Elsie Rieti, December 13, 1930, courtesy Fabio Rieti.

17. MJ to Minet, March 12, 1931, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 62–63.

18. MJ, “J’en passe et des meilleures,” Nouvelle Revue française, no. 211 (April 1931): 593–97. (The title is an idiomatic expression: “And so on, I’m not mentioning the best.”)

19. MJ to Minet, March 12, 1931, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 62.

20. The exchange runs February 25–May 21, 1931, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 160–69.

21. MJ to Paulhan, April 22, 1931, ibid., 167.

22. MJ to Minet, April 12, 1931, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 68.

23. MJ to Minet, April 28, 1931, ibid., 69–70. MJ to Esdras-Gosse, July 10, 1931, in MJ, Lettres à Esdras-Gosse, 25.

24. MJ to Minet, April 28, 1931, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 69–70.

25. MJ, “Montmartre,” Le Figaro artistique illustré, June 1931, 19–21.

26. MJ, “Je suis né à Quimper . . . ,” in Dictionnaire biographique des artistes contemporains 1910–1930, ed. René Édouard-Joseph (Paris: Art et Édition, 1931), 210–12.

27. MJ to Léon Merle de Beaufort, July 26, 1931, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 345–46.

28. MJ to René Laporte, July 8, 1931, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:261–62.

29. MJ to Minet, July 26, 1931, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 75.

30. MJ to de Gouy, August 21, 1931, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:263–65.

31. MJ to Minet, November 8 and 21, 1931, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 76–78. MJ to Esdras-Gosse, November 8, 1931, in MJ, Lettres à Esdras-Gosse, 27. 

32. MJ to Minet, April 6, 1931, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 67.

33. Abbé Morel, conversation with author.

34. MJ to the Ghikas, December 6, 1931, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 111–12.

35. Francis Poulenc, Correspondance 1910–1963, ed. Myriam Chimènes (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 354.

36. Francis Poulenc, Mes Amis et moi, ed. Stéphane Audel (Paris: La Palatine, 1963), 98–107. Four of the songs Poulenc chose for “Cinq Poèmes de Max Jacob” subsequently appeared in PMG: “Chanson,” “Cimetière,” “La Petite servante,” and “Berceuse,” in O, 1620, 1621, 1628, 1637. The poems in Le Bal masqué are from LC: “Madame la Dauphine,” “Malvina,” “La Dame aveugle,” and “Autre personnage du bal masqué,” in O, 603, 624, 625.

37. MJ, “Le Veuf,” with variants: MJ to Sachs, October 30, 1927, in ms. 2579, Orléans; R, in O, 1442.

38. MJ, “Vous n’écrivez plus?,” R, in O, 1441. MJ, “Noces d’aveugles,” R, in O, 1443.

39. MJ, “L’Armée frappante des images,” R, in O, 1449.

40. Pierre Guéguen, “Actualités poétiques,” Nouvelles littéraires, April 23, 1932, 5.

41. MJ, “Confession publique ou caricature de Max Jacob par lui-même,” Renaissance, December 1931, 331–33.

42. MJ to the Ghikas, January 6, 1932, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 114–15.

43. MJ to Paulhan, January 27, 1932, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 173.

44. MJ to Yves Gérard Le Dantec, January 29, 1932, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:270.

45. MJ to de Gouy, February 5, 1932, ibid., 1:270–71.

46. MJ to Paulhan, March 10, 1932, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 176–77. The politician was Léon Bérard, a minister of public education and senator, now active in the Ministry of Justice.

47. Rings: MJ to Minet, November 8, 1931, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 76. Watch: MJ to de Gouy, c. April 1932, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:274. Taxi for Minet: MJ to Minet, April 16, 1932, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 79. MJ to Rimbert, April 11, 1932, in MJ, Lettres à Rimbert, 65. MJ to Cocteau, April 13, 1932, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 576. 

48. MJ to Ferrare, June 1932, in MJ, “Lettres à Ferrare,” 66–68.

49. In Liane’s diary, May 16, 1932, in Pougy, Mes cahiers, 270.

50. MJ to de Gouy, c. April 1932, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:274–75.

51. Trefusis was Violet Keppel, daughter of Edward VII’s mistress, Alice Keppel. A novelist who wrote both in French and in English, Trefusis had a steamy affair of some years with Vita Sackville-West. She was now living in Paris in a long romance with Winnaretta Singer, the Princesse de Polignac.

52. MJ to Grenier, June 21, 1932, in MJ, Lettres à un ami, 83.

53. MJ, “Naissance de cubisme et autres,” Nouvelles littéraires, April 30, 1932, 7.

54. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 225n3.

55. The scene is reported in Paul Léautaud’s journal for April 8, 1932. Paul Léautaud, Journal littéraire, vol. 9 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1960), 211–12. Quoted in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 225n3.

56. MJ to de Gouy, June 21, 1932, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 360–61.

57. Franc-Nohain, “Les Livres nouveaux, Bourgeois de France et d’ailleurs,” Écho de Paris, July 14, 1932, 4.

58. Fortunat Strowski, Quotidien, July 5, 1932; Victor Moremans, “Max Jacob: Bourgeois de France et d’ailleurs,” Gazette de Liège, July 27, 1932.

59. MJ, “Convalescence,” Feuillets inutiles, September 30, 1932, 10. Nouvelle Revue française no. 250 (July 1934): 21–22; in HC, 84. “Actualités éternelles,” Feuillets inutiles, September 1932. Actualités éternelles would be the title given posthumously to a collection of Jacob’s religious poetry edited by Jean Denoël and Didier Gompel-Netter in 1996 (Éditions de la Différence). Jacob wrote to Henri Ferrare on June 21, 1932, that he thought the Nouvelle Revue Française would bring out a volume of his “mystical poems” in prose and verse. Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 1 (1978): 68.

60. Albert Camus to Grenier, May 20 and August 25, 1932, in Moishe Black, “Non récupérables: Camus et Max Jacob,” in Les Trois Guerres d’Albert Camus, ed. Lionel Dubois (Poitiers: Actes du Colloque International de Poitiers, 1995), 250–64.

61. MJ to Grenier, June 21, 1932, in MJ, Lettres à un ami, 83–84.

62. MJ to Minet, August 1932, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 82–83. Jacob explained the outcome of the suit, along with the puns, to de Gouy, June 21, 1932, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:360–61.

63. MJ to de Gouy, August 13, 1932, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 362–63. Andreu, Vie et mort, 221.

64. Sinclair, “Sur Max Jacob,” Arcadie, no. 192 (December 1969): 573–77.

65. Ibid., 574–5.

66. MJ, “La Lettre de la fiancée,” to René Dulsou, c. October 1932, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:280–81.

67. MJ to Dulsou, c. November 1932, ibid., 1:281–82.

68. MJ to Dulsou, c. December 1932, ibid., 1:284.

69. MJ to Dulsou, c. early January 1933, ibid., 1:285–86.

70. MJ to Dulsou, March 31, 1933, ibid., 1:297–99.

71. MJ to Minet, February 20, 1932, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 89–90.

72. MJ to Laporte, November 11, 1931, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:267.

73. MJ to Paulhan, March 11, 1933, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 189–90.

74. MJ to Marie delle Donne, March 7, 1933, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:287.

75. MJ to Dulsou, April 6, 1933, ibid., 1:303–4.

76. MJ to Dulsou, April 4, 1933, ibid., 1:302–3.

77. MJ, “Jeunesse,” 1–2. In May, he celebrated the republication of Albert-Birot’s radical novel Grabinoulor in recollections of the other bohemia, Montparnasse: “Dada didn’t exist yet. It would be born in Zurich and we prepared its cradle.” MJ, “Souvenirs et critique,” Nouvelles littéraires, May 13, 1933, 1.

78. Notes by René Villard on a conversation with Jacob, mid-September 1933, in MJ, Lettres à Villard, 50.

79. Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux, 243. Oxenhandler supposed the award to have been given on November 23, 1933. It was July 13, 1933. See Rodriguez, O, 86. For Jacob’s letter asking Salmon to be the one to “receive” him into this society of honor: “It’s natural and simple that your name should come to my pen, my heart, my thought.” Andreu, Vie et mort, 208–9.

80. MJ to Pougy, May 22, 1933, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 119.

81. MJ to Dulsou, March 26, 1933, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:291.

82. MJ, “Ballade de la visite nocturne,” Point, April 1938; B, in O, 1461.

83. Dulsou, who made Jacob suffer during their affair, claimed the connection with proprietary pride long after his lover’s death, writing about him twice in Arcadie, the only openly homosexual literary journal in France in those years. In 1982, as “Sinclair,” he reviewed Andreu’s biography of Jacob with a nasty possessiveness, calling it the “long slow work of an ant.” He took pains to correct Andreu’s dating of “La Ballade de la visite nocturne”: Andreu should have known that 1929, the date in the text, was a fiction; “Sinclair” proudly testified that he knew better and that the poem described the winter of 1933–34. Sinclair, “Vie et Mort de Max Jacob,” Arcadie, May 1982, 316. This was the last year of the journal’s relatively discreet existence, as a new, militant gay rights movement arose in France.

84. MJ to Émile Dulsou, August 5, 1933, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:313.

85. Tatiana Greene, “Notice, en préambule aux lettres de Max Jacob à Marguerite Mespoulet,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 4 (1981): 32.

86. MJ, Lettres à Villard, 43–44.

87. MJ to Minet, August 30, 1933, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 95.

88. On a postcard sent from Quimper on September 25, 1933, he bids farewell to Villard in nearby Ploaré, in MJ, Lettres à Villard, 45.

89. Sachs, Sabbat, 223.

90. The book was published in New York in 1933.

91. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 213–18.

92. Sachs, Décade, 220.

93. MJ to Minet, November 1, 1933, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 96–97.

94. MJ to Dulsou, c. November 5, 1933, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:315. 

95. Program, Société des Amis de la Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Gala de Musique Moderne, December 11, 1933.

96. André de Richaud, “Max à l'École Militaire,” Cahiers des saisons, no. 16 (Spring 1959): 679.

97. Alice Halicka, Hier, souvenirs (Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1946), 129.

98. MJ, “La T.S.F.,” Année poétique 2, no. 2 (January 1934): n.p. This issue featured Picasso's portrait of Jacob as Roman consul and presented ten of his poems, only one of which was later collected in a book: “Chanson du mendiant” appeared in PMG, in O, 1660.

99. Jacob recounted these stories in the Lecture at Nantes in 1937; the probable text is in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 241, and also in MJ, “Le tiers transporté.”

100. É. Jouhandeau, Lien de ronces, 144.

101. Andreu, Le Rouge et le blanc, 67.

102. Pougy, diary entries for August 8 and 18 and October 1934. “Mussolini is my idol these days,” in Pougy, Mes cahiers, 284–85.

103. MJ to Dulsou, April 14, 1934, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:55–56.

104. MJ, “Astrologie 1934,” Intransigeant, January 2, 1934, 3.

105. MJ to Dulsou, February 4–7, 1934, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:15–19.

106. MJ to Dulsou, February 11, 1934, ibid., 2:23–27.

107. MJ to Dulsou, March 1, 1934, ibid., 2:41.

108. Of the Gompels, he was especially close with his younger cousin Thérèse Gompel, whom he had always liked, now Madame Lazarus; and Yvonne Netter, the feminist lawyer, daughter of his old employer Gustave Gompel, and mother of Didier Gompel-Netter, who would become an important collector of Jacobiana.

109. MJ to Dulsou, February 10, 1934, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:46.

110. MJ to Dulsou, March 7, 1934, ibid., 2:41–45.

111. MJ to Dulsou, February 16, 1934, ibid., 2:29–30.

112. MJ to Dulsou, March 18, 1934, ibid., 2:50–51.

113. MJ to Dulsou, March 13, 1934, ibid., 2:48–49.

114. MJ to Dulsou, April 11 and 14, 1934, ibid., 2:54–59. He described meeting Belcourt in a letter to Dulsou, February 25, 1934, ibid., 2:35–37. He also described the accident to Paulhan, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 198.

115. MJ to Dulsou, July 4–19, 1934, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:63–75.

116. MJ, Lettres à Minet, 102–3.

117. MJ, Amitiés, 2:113.

118. Letter partly quoted in Andreu, Vie et mort, 225. Original in letters to René Lacôte, Fonds Max Jacob, Orléans.

119. MJ to Paulhan, June 29, 1934, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 202.

120. Gabriel Bounoure, “Les Pénitents en maillots roses, Visions infernales, Fond de l’eau, Rivages par Max Jacob,” Nouvelle Revue française, no. 250 (July 1934): 109–18.

121. MJ, “Actualités éternelles,” ibid., 20–27. Titles: “Actualités éternelles,” “Stella Maris, comme l’on dit,” “Convalescence,” “Séjours de Dieu,” “Explication de la transfigurations,” “Déménagements,” “Celui qui m’a brûlé le coeur,” “Dans les replis,” “Paradis,” “Invocation sans lyre,” and “Colloque.” “Convalescence” appeared in 1932 in Les Feuillets inutiles and was collected in HC. “Invocation sans lyre” appeared in Mesures in 1935.

122. MJ, “Toudoux, Ginette, et les parents,” Figaro illustré, February 1934. In MJ, Amitiés, 3:179–80.

123. MJ, “La Spirale et le serpent,” Nouvelles littéraires, February 10, 1934.

124. MJ, “Les Deux amours,” “Une nuit de Verlaine,” “La Conscience est bien gênante,” and “Fin du jour au carnaval,” Journal des poètes, February 18, 1934. In MJ, Amitiés, 3:140–43.

125. Schmitt-Kummerlee, “Un manuscrit retrouvé,” 92. MJ, “El verdadero sentido,” and “Las Plagas de Egipto.” 

126. MJ, “Crucifixion” and “Prière,” Beau Navire 1, no. 2 (December 10, 1934): 20–21. AE, 168, 251.

127. MJ to Dulsou, April 23, 1934, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:61. MJ to Queneau, c. March 1935, in MJ, “Lettres à Raymond Queneau,” Cahier de l’Herne, no. 29 (1975): 215.

128. MJ to Dulsou, January 22, 1935, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:86.

129. MJ to Dulsou, January 26, 1935, ibid., 2:88–89.

130. MJ to Dulsou, January 31, 1935, ibid., 2:89–91.

131. MJ to Dulsou, January 2–February 13, 1935, ibid., 2:85–96.

132. MJ to Dulsou, May 24, 1935, ibid., 2:102–4.

133. MJ to Dulsou, April 12, 1933, ibid., 1:308–9.

134. MJ to Dulsou, c. February 1934, ibid., 2:10–12.

135. MJ to Dulsou, July 1, 1935, ibid., 2:107–9.

136. MJ to Paulhan, July 19, 1935, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 211.

137. Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux, 242.

138. MJ to René Iché, July 31, 1935, in Max Jacob écrit, 160.

139. MJ to Madame Dulsou, October 14, 1935, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:111.

140. Henri Vandeputte, “Max,” Beaux-Arts 5, no. 171 (August 1935): 20–21, reprinted in Max Jacob à la confluence, 121–25.

141. MJ to Vandeputte, September 24, 1935, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 398–99.

142. It’s not clear now long Olga knew about the affair. Richardson, Life, 3:418–19.

143. Pierre Cabanne, Le Siècle de Picasso, II: L’époque des métamorphoses (1912–1937) (1975; Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 2:739–40.

144. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 235.

145. MJ to Fraysse, September 19, 1935, in Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux, 243–44.

146. Strong suspicion emerged, years later, that Juliette was responsible for the death of her second husband and the attempted murder of her stepson, but Jacob could have had no inkling of that.

147. MJ to Paulhan, September 2, 1934, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 205.

148. Raczymow, Maurice Sachs, 237–38.

149. MJ to Pougy, November 3, 1935, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 132–33.

150. Lyne Bansat-Boudon and Roland Lardinois, Sylvain Lévi (1863–1935): Études indiennes, histoire sociale (Turnhaut, Belgium: Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, Sciences Religieuses, 2003), 285. Désirée Bloch Lévi (Dédée) was Jacob’s first cousin, the daughter of his paternal aunt Julie Bloch. Dédée’s sister Noémie married Gustave Gompel, the department store magnate, and her nephew Jean-Richard Bloch (the son of her brother the engineer Richard Bloch) was the politically active writer with whom Jacob corresponded for years. 

151. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 235–36.

152. MJ to Fraysse, November 15, 1935, in Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux, 245.

153. MJ to Madame Dulsou, December 12, 1935, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:114.

154. MJ to Fraysse, December 27, 1935, in Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux, 253. Heartbreak or not, Le Louët, who had promised much as a young poet, eventually ruined his life, and Andreu recalled seeing him wandering as a wreck in the Quartier Latin in the 1970s, his pants held up by string. Andreu, Vie et mort, 228.

155. MJ to Marcel Moré, December 25, 1935, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 400.

156. MJ, “Poèmes mystiques,” Mesures, no. 4 (October 15, 1935): 49–55.

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1. MJ to Fraysse, January 3 and 9, 1937, in Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux, 253–54.

2. Jacob wrote René Laporte that he had no more telephone: “It brings bad luck.” MJ to Laporte, April 5, 1936, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:122. He reminded Fraysse several times that he had no telephone and that he hardly opened the door, instructing him to knock loudly and say his name. MJ to Fraysse, April 10 and 20, 1936, in Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux, 257–58.

3. Jacob recounted this estrangement disingenuously to his old friend Charles Oulmont: “Mme M. de Beaufort is a secret friendship.—Secret because her husband won’t let her see me or write to me, etc. I no longer know why.” MJ to Oulmont, May 12, 1940, in Max Jacob écrit, 60.

4. MJ, “L'Amour enterré,” Feuillets inutiles, February 15, 1936, n.p. MJ, “Caïn et Abel,” to Jabès, c. Autumn 1935, in MJ, Lettres à Jabès, 29–30; HC, 57.

5. MJ, “Roman de l'amour enterré,” Feuilles vertes, October–November 1935, 88–89; HC, 25. Jacob lightly echoes Apollinaire’s famous refrain in “Le Pont Mirabeau”: “Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure / Les jours s’en vont je demeure.”

6. MJ, “Amour enterré,” Feux de Paris, no. 2 (January 12, 1936): n.p.; Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux, 275. HC, 59; DP, in O, 1573. The version in HC lacks the last two lines.

7. Michel Winock, La France et les Juifs: De 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 2004) 193.

8. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 238.

9. MJ to Lanoë, January 29, February n.d., and February 24, 1936, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 281–88.

10. Jacob’s engagement at Les Noctambules ran from March 21 to April 13. MJ, “Pourquoi j’aime Marianne Oswald,” Marianne Oswald (Paris: An. Girard, 1936), n.p. Descriptions of Jacob’s act at the Noctambules: Andreu, Vie et mort, 229–30; MJ to Esdras-Gosse, March 29, 1936, in MJ, Lettres à Esdras-Gosse, 35–36; Salmon, Souvenirs, 3:367. Oswald, with her flaming red hair, was known for reciting poetry as well as singing; Jacob contributed a page to a booklet in her honor, in which Cocteau, Mauriac, Aragon, Salmon, and Jean-Richard Bloch also praised her.

11. René Lacôte, “Max Jacob à St.-Benoît-sur-Loire,” Lettres françaises, May 14, 1959, 2.

12. MJ to Cingria, c. April 1936, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:122.

13. Jacob’s poems in the Anthologie des poètes de La Nouvelle Revue française (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1936): “Ethnographie du démon,” “Formidables erreurs du mysticisme,” “Années pourries,” “Après la méditation sous un arbre,” “Exhortation,” “Pensée d'automne,” “Éducation laïque,” “Séjour,” “Voyage,” “Voisinage,” and “Jamais plus!” They are all from VI. Anne Kimball’s list of poems in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, is completely different and represents a later edition of the Anthologie. MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 224n2.

14. MJ to Fraysse, March 26 and April 28, 1936, in Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux, 255, 259.

15. MJ to du Plantier, March 21, 1936, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 402.

16. MJ to du Plantier, April 26, 1936, ibid., 403–5.

17. MJ to Fraysse, May 24, 1936, in Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux, 261.

18. Andreu, Vie et mort, 231; Béalu, Dernier visage, 13.

19. MJ to Frank, September 5, 1936, in MJ, Lettres à Frank, 159–60.

20. MJ to de Gouy, January 15, 1937, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:135. MJ to Frank, November 7, 1936, in MJ, Lettres à Frank, 165.

21. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 239.

22. MJ to Paulhan, September 20, 1936, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 225–26.

23. Belaval, Rencontre, 42.

24. MJ to Marcel Moré, May 31, 1936, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 408.

25. MJ to Queneau, June 2, 1936, in MJ, “Lettres à Queneau,” 218–19.

26. He mentioned the Guillaume preface to Fraysse on November 7 and in December 1935, as well as on January 9, April 7, and June 10, 1936, in Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux, 244–62. His complaints to Moricand can be found in letters c. May 1936; August 23 and December 5, 1936; and January 23, 1937. The Moricand correspondence is in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, BnF 24919. Some but not all of these letters are included in MJ, Lettres 1920–1941, ed. S. J. Collier (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966). The letter from December 5, 1936, is in MJ, Lettres 1920–1941, 61–62.

27. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 239.

28. Jean Fraysse published the memoir as “Le tiers transporté: Chronique des temps héroïques” in Les Feux de Paris, no. 7–8 (January 12, 1937); Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux, 287–302. In 1956, Picasso illustrated a larger version incorporating the text Jacob composed after the chronicle in Les Feux de Paris in a deluxe limited edition entitled Chronique des temps héroïques (Paris: Louis Broder, 1956).

29. MJ to Jabès, June 4, 1936, in MJ, Lettres à Jabès, 30–33. Jacob’s letter on June 10, 1936, to Fraysse was hardly a recommendation. Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux, 261–65.

30. MJ to Paulhan, October 8, 1936, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 227–28. Béalu wrote a vivid book about Jacob, including many letters: Dernier visage de Max Jacob (Lyon: E. Vitte, 1959).

31. Anne Mary, “Lettres de Max Jacob à Roger Lannes, La Tige et l’orchidée (1935–1943),” Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 11–12 (2012): 80n38.

32. MJ to Moricand, August 23, 1936, in Moricand, BnF. Lagarde later wrote a book about Jacob: Max Jacob, mystique et martyre (Paris: Éditions Bandinière, 1944).

33. Mary, “Lettres de Jacob à Lannes,” 53–84. The excerpts from Lannes’s diary make chilling reading, so unabashed is the careerism. In January 1939, trying to line up influential participants for the evening in his honor, Lannes noted: “I’ve written to Max and to Paul Fort to ask their support. I absolutely must persuade Supervielle to be present.” Mary, “Lettres de Jacob à Lannes,” 79n27.

34. As it turned out, Jacob spent only October there. MJ to Rimbert, c. September 1936, in MJ, Lettres à Rimbert, 71–72. MJ to Frank, October 18, 1936, in MJ, Lettres à Frank, 36.

35. MJ to Paulhan, October 8, 1936, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 227–28.

36. MJ to Moricand, January 5, 1937, in Moricand, BnF.

37. This large correspondence is preserved in the BnF and in part in Collier’s Lettres 1920–1941. Dr. Szigeti’s judgment of Moricand as ignoble: interview by author. Moricand’s unpublished memoir, composed in old age in a nursing home for the indigent, is a document of Satanic selfishness. It describes his exploits in fornicating with children; his collaboration with the Nazis under the Occupation (as a functionary in their radio propaganda office in Paris); his employment in propaganda in Nazi Germany; and his wandering across Europe at the war’s end trying to evade both the Soviet and the American armies and to escape French soil where he knew he’d be prosecuted as a traitor. He’s in essence a one-man symbol of the decadence of Europe. 

38. MJ to Lacôte, August 20, 1936, in MJ, “Lettres de Max Jacob à René Lacôte (1934–1944),” ed. Béatrice Mousli, Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 11–12 (2012): 26–28.

39. Edmond Jabès, interview by author.

40. MJ to Jabès, February 13, 1936, in MJ, Lettres à Jabès, 38–39.

41. MJ to Jabès, c. January 1938, ibid., 49–53.

42. Ibid., 52.

43. “Knew those funerals”: MJ to Jabès, March 8, 1937, ibid., 40–42. Story of disagreement over the poem and burning it: Jabès interview. 

44. Michel Manoll, René Guy Cadou (Paris: Seghers, 1954), 77.

45. Ibid., 35.

46. Ibid., 77.

47. Winock, France et les Juifs, 194.

48. MJ to Fraysse, June 10, 1936, in Oxenhandler, Max Jacob and Les Feux, 261–63.

49. Assouline, An Artful Life, 278.

50. Marcel Jouhandeau, “La Prière de Max Jacob, ou le jongleur de Notre Seigneur,” Le Mail, no. 5 (April 1928): 60.

51. Marcel Jouhandeau, “Comment je suis devenu antisémite,” Action française, October 8, 1936, 1, 4.

52. MJ to Marcel Moré, November 26, 1936, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 421–22. MJ to Queneau, December 10, 1936, in MJ, “Lettres à Queneau,” 220–21.

53. MJ to Paulhan, January 13, 1937, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 229–31.

54. MJ to Frank, November 15, 1936, in MJ, Lettres à Frank, 167–68.

55. MJ, “La Purge,” Revue doloriste, December 1, 1936, 3–5.

56. Jacob reported the visit to many friends: MJ to Pougy, January 19, 1937, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 146; MJ to Leiris, January 22, 1937, in MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 129–30; MJ to Pierre Colle, February 7, 1937, in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 431; as well as in several letters to Salmon, in private collections, cited in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 240. Jacob’s relations with Leiris were now affectionate and untroubled; he invited him and his wife Zette to visit him in Saint-Benoît and sent greetings to the Leiris-Kahnweiler clan (which included Élie Lascaux and his wife Berthe, Lucie Kahnweiler’s sister; Queneau; and Marcel Moré). Jacob’s love for Leiris was now sublimated: “There’s something higher than friendship and that’s the bond of the spirit, what the mystics call the mystic union in God.” MJ, Lettres à Leiris, 130.

57. MC, 14.

58. A text for what was probably the lecture on art is preserved in the Colle Archives and is reprinted in Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 241–49. This text contains Jacob’s totally unsupported assertion that Apollinaire’s father was Madame de Kostrowitzky’s considerably younger lover, Jules Weil, with whom she lived in her last years. The man’s age alone would have made this paternity impossible. No one in Nantes seems to have objected, but when Jacob made the same claim in a lecture in Paris the following year, he ran into serious trouble. He described the lecture on Noah to Jabès: March 7, 1937, in MJ, Lettres à Jabès, 40–42.

59. MJ to Lacôte, March 3, June 22, and September 27, 1937, in MJ, “Lettres à Lacôte,” 33–37.

60. MJ to Giovanni Leonardi, March 27, 1937, in Hélène Henry, “Correspondance Max Jacob–Giovanni Leonardi 1920–1944,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 8 (1986): 67–68. On storms: MJ to Lannes, March 28, 1937, in Mary, “Lettres de Jacob à Lannes,” 61; and MJ to Pougy, April 5, 1937, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 147–49.

61. MJ to Moricand, April 4, 1937, in Moricand, BnF. MJ to Pougy, April 5, 1937, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 147–49. His disgust arose partly from vexation at having had to press the “very chic” gentleman, M. Lelièvre, director of the museum, in order to be paid for his lectures.

62. Béalu describes their meeting in Dernier visage, 27–30.

63. MJ to Béalu, October 16, 1937, ibid., 129–30.

64. MJ to Toulouse, June 4, 1937, in MJ, Lettres à Roger Toulouse, ed. Patricia Sustrac and Christine Van Rogger Andreucci (Troyes: Librairie Bleue, 1992), 20–21.

65. MJ to Toulouse, November 7, 1937, ibid., 26.

66. MJ to Toulouse, November 14, 1937, ibid., 27.

67. MJ to Béalu, November 7, 1937, in Béalu, Dernier visage, 131.

68. MJ to Toulouse, June 8, 1935, in MJ, Lettres à Toulouse, 21. MJ to Béalu, June 8 and later in June, 1937, in Béalu, Dernier visage, 110–11.

69. MJ to Salmon, c. June 1937, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:140–42.

70. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 249.

71. MJ to Béalu, July 19, 1937, in Béalu, Dernier visage, 123.

72. “At home nowhere”: MJ to Béalu, June 8, 1937, ibid., 110–11. MJ to Lanoë, August 17, 1937, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 323.

73. MJ to Levanti, May 31, 1937, in MJ, Lettres à Levanti, 52–53.

74. Jacob filled hundreds of letters with his advice. The tips about the cafés are in a letter from Brittany in June 1937. MJ to Béalu, in Béalu, Dernier visage, 112–14.

75. MJ to Lacôte, April 24, 1937, in MJ, “Lettres à Lacôte,” 34–35.

76. MJ to Paulhan, January 26 and 31, 1937, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 232–37.

77. Preparation at the Béalus: Béalu, Dernier visage, 38. Szigeti’s description of the talk: Peyre, Jacob quotidien, 68. The talk was published a few days later: MJ, “La Poésie? Un rêve inventé,” Nouvelles littéraires, November 6, 1937, 1; in O, 1523.

78. MJ, “La Petite voleuse,” Pain blanc, September 1937, 2–3; PMG, in O, 1619.

79. MJ, Lettres à Manoll, 36–37.

80. MJ to Béalu, November 12, 1937, in Béalu, Dernier visage, 131–32.

81. Jacob’s account to Dr. Szigeti, in Peyre, Jacob quotidien, 66–67.

82. MJ to Béalu, November 12, 1937, in Béalu, Dernier visage, 131–32.

83. MJ to Béalu, c. November 1937, ibid., 132–33.

84. MJ to Jabès, December 18, 1937, in MJ, Lettres à Jabès, 46–47.

85. MJ to René Villard, December 2, 1937, in MJ, Lettres à Villard, 77.

86. Lanoë complimented Jacob on “Face” in a letter dated August 19, 1937: MJ, Lettres à Lanoë. The poem was printed in HC, 45, and in Poésie vivante, no. 16 (1966): 17.

87. Andreu, Vie et mort, 238. MJ, “Douleur,” Occident, December 25, 1937, 8; HC, 66.

88. MJ, “Pour l'Espagne,” Occident, February 25, 1938, 8.

89. “On m'a fait signer un truc pour Franco . . . ,” Peyre, Jacob quotidien, 102.

90. MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 248n1.

91. Belaval, Rencontre, 58. Jacob nursed this grievance until the end of his life, mentioning it several times to Louis Dumoulin, a friend and patron of his last years. MJ to Dumoulin, May 16, 1942, and February 15, 1943, in Max Jacob écrit, 216, 225.

92. MJ to Béalu, January 31, 1938, in Béalu, Dernier visage, 135.

93. MJ to Pougy, April 5, 1937, in MJ, Lettres à Pougy, 148.

94. Josiah Adès was a lawyer and a conventional painter, part English, part Egyptian, for whom Jacob had written a laudatory preface to a catalogue for his show at Pierre Colle’s gallery in 1933, a paying job. MJ, Adès (Paris: Éditions du Chronique du Jour, 1933). Jacob liked Adès, but he was obviously unhappy with the assignment: he spent most of the preface speculating on the painter's horoscope and twisted himself in knots trying to find complimentary things to say about the art. Adès visited him several times in Saint-Benoît. See letter to René Iché, July 27, 1936, in Max Jacob écrit, 165.

95. Peyre, Jacob quotidien, 58–59.

96. Andreu, Vie et mort, 245.

97. MJ to Moricand, May 24, 1937, in Moricand, BnF.

98. MJ to Moricand, August 14, 1937, in MJ, Lettres 1920–1941, 76.

99. MJ to Moricand, February 13, 1938, ibid., 80–81.

100. MJ, “La Guerre,” Point 3, no. 13 (February 1938): 21.

101. MJ to Dr. Szigeti, February 14, 1938, in Robert Szigeti, “Max Jacob,” Documents du Val d’Or, no. 47 (March–April 1947): 10.

102. MJ to Jean-Robert Debray, April 20, 1938, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:103.

103. MJ to Toulouse, March 17, 1938, in MJ, Lettres à Toulouse, 32–33.

104. René Villard, “Max Jacob collégien,” Goëland, April 1, 1938, reprinted in Gompel-Netter and Marcoux, Les Propos et les jours, 447–49.

105. MJ, “Ballade de la visite nocturne,” Point, no. 14 (April 1938): 81–82; B, in O, 1461.

106. MJ to Debray, April 30, 1938, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:164–65.

107. MJ to the Debrays, May 17, 1938, ibid., 2:166–68.

108. Charles Estienne, “Notes prises par le critique Charles Estienne lors d’une conférence faite à Brest par Max Jacob en mai 1938 sur le lyrisme,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 8 (1986): 37–38.

109. MJ to Debray, May 22, 1938, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:168–69. MJ to Moricand, June 21, 1938, in Moricand, BnF.

110. Hélène Henry, “La Ville engloutie et la chute de la maison Jacob,” Cahiers de l’Iroise, no. 30 (1983): 86–91.

111. Paul T. Pelleau, Saint-Pol-Roux le crucifié (Nantes: Éditions du Fleuve, 1946), 120.

112. MJ to Cingria, c. end of May 1938, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:170–71.

113. MJ to Toulouse, August n.d. and 25, 1938, in MJ, Lettres à Toulouse, 33–35.

114. Lyne Bansat-Boudon and Roland Lardinois, Sylvain Lévi (1863–1935), études indiennes, histoire sociale (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003), 285.

115. MJ to Debray, April 5, 1938, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:161.

116. Béalu describes Jacob’s daily life in Saint-Benoît: Béalu, Dernier visage, 17–21.

117. MJ to Debray, June 21, 1938, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:175.

118. MJ to Debray, July 26, 1938, ibid., 2:178.

119. MJ to Toulouse, c. August 1938, in MJ, Lettres à Toulouse, 34–35.

120. MJ to Debray, July 4, 1938, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:176–77.

121. MJ to Debray, September 10, 1938, ibid., 2:184.

122. MJ to Toulouse, October 4, 1938, in MJ, Lettres à Toulouse, 37–39.

123. MJ to Lanoë, September 23, 1938, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 348.

124. MJ to Debray, September 25, 1938, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:185.

125. MJ to Debray, October 17 and 26, 1938, ibid., 2:186–87.

126. MJ to Debray, November 23, 1938, ibid., 2:189–90. MJ, “La Balle,” Documents du Val d’Or, November 1938. DP, in O, 1562.

127. MJ to Alain Messiaen, December 8, 1938, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:192.

128. MJ to Debray, December 27, 1938, ibid., 2:193–94.

129. MJ to Queneau, January 2, 1939, in MJ, “Lettres à Queneau,” 223.

130. MJ to Queneau, January 24, 1939, ibid.

131. MJ to Debray, March 2, 1939, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:198. For Jacob’s description of the book on the Scriptures, see his letter to Gallimard, January 24, 1939, in O, 1484.

132. André Gide, “Max Jacob,” Aguedal, 1939, 101.

133. Jean Cocteau, “Signe à Max,” ibid., 155.

134. MJ to Levanti, October 27, 1938, in MJ, Lettres à Levanti, 72–74.

135. MJ to Levanti, March 23, 1938, ibid., 68–69.

136. MJ to Levanti, June 13, 1939, ibid., 77–78.

137. MJ to Debray, c. May 1939, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:200–201.

138. Jabès interview.

139. MJ to Jabès, c. January 1938, in MJ, Lettres à Jabès, 59–60.

140. Jabès interview.

141. MJ to Jabès, c. January 1938, in MJ, Lettres à Jabès, 59–60.

142. MJ to Jabès, May 1, 1939, ibid., 61. Jabès last wrote to Jacob in February 1944, “twenty-five words of affection and concern,” as he later described it. The letter was returned to him with a note on the envelope: “Deceased.” Edmond Jabès, preface to MJ, Advice to a Young Poet, trans. and ed. John Adlard (London: Menard Press, 1976), 5.

143. Receipt, May 6, 1939. Private collection, Olivier Zunz.

144. Olivier Zunz, “Note sur Robert Zunz et le monarchisme,” unpublished essay, 4.

145. Ibid., 7.

146. MJ, “Lettres de Max Jacob à Robert Zunz, Correspondance inédite, 1939–1944,” ed. Patricia Sustrac, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 109, no. 4 (2009): 909–35.

147. Jacob wrote excitedly about the commission to Toulouse, René Villard, and Debray: MJ to Toulouse, May 16, 1939, in MJ, Lettres à Toulouse, 46–47; MJ to Villard, May 15, 1939, in MJ, Lettres à Villard, 85; MJ to Debray, c. May 1939, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:200–201. Gompel’s note to last letter is mistaken. He identifies the “great banker” as André Lefèvre, whereas it was obviously Robert Zunz.

148. 11th Station, in O, 1503.

149. 5th Station, ibid., 1498.

150. Ibid., 1491. This album is in the collection of the Médiathèque d’Orléans.

151. MJ to Robert Zunz, June 15, 1939. “Egyptian pharaohs”: MJ to Robert Zunz, March 26, 1940. Private collection, Olivier Zunz.

152. MJ, “Récit de ma conversion,” in O, 1473. The text was published in March 1951 in La Vie intellectuelle and in André Blanchet’s edition of DT, 1964.

153. O, 1479.

154. MJ to Toulouse, May 16, 1939, in MJ, Lettres à Toulouse, 46.

155. Louis Guilloux, Carnets 1921–1944 (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 392.

156. MJ to Villard, January 4, 1939, in MJ, Lettres à Villard, 81.

157. MJ to François de Montalivet, July 28, 1939, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:208–9.

158. Pelleau, Saint-Pol-Roux, 160–61. Jean Caveng, Max Jacob et Quimper (Quimper: Calligrammes, 1984), 50.

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1. MJ to Villard, September 13, 1939, in MJ, Lettres à Villard, 89.

2. MJ to François de Montalivet, November 8, 1939, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:217. Montalivet was the director of the Crédit Lyonnais bank in Gien.

3. Jacob probably found the room at Madame Persillard’s through his friendship with her son Maurice, who had some medical training. He described Maurice in a letter to Louis Vaillant, August 24, 1938, in Max Jacob écrit, 106. He described the expulsion by the Roberts to Dr. Szigeti, November 7, 1939, ibid., 260n5. On Madame Persillard’s cooking: MJ to René Cadou, June 8, 1941, in Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 13–14 (2013): 268. On reading his mail: MJ to Lanoë, January 6, 1942, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 459.

4. MJ to Montalivet, September 15, 1939, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:211–12. 

5. MJ to Minet, October 6, 1939, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 109–10.

6. MJ to Toulouse, September 10, 1939, in MJ, Lettres à Toulouse, 51–52.

7. MJ to Lanoë, March 21, 1940, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 369.

8. MJ to Jean-Robert Debray, January 12, 1940, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:228. On Toulouse, see MJ to Levanti, January 24, 1940, in MJ, Lettres à Levanti, 85–86. Jacob wrote Manoll on July 20, 1940, to give him the military addresses of Cadou and Follain, both in the Pyrenees, in MJ, Lettres à Manoll, 61. Queneau would be demobilized in July 1940: Francine de Martinoir, La Littérature occupée: Les années de guerre, 1939–1945 (Paris: Hatier, 1995), 121.

9. Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945: Anxiety and Hypocrisy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, 1981), 340.

10. David Thomas, France: Empire and Republic, 1850–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 357.

11. Renée Poznanski, Denis Peschanski, and Benoît Pouvreau, Drancy: Un camp en France (Paris: Fayard, and Ministère de la Défense, 2015), 30.

12. MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 252.

13. Assouline, L’homme de l’art, 515.

14. Interviews with Vittorio Rieti and Fabio Rieti, his son. Elsie Rieti was the daughter of a Jewish Romanian banker but had the good fortune to be born in New York, so she had an American passport, and thus she and her child had no difficulty escaping Europe.

15. Saint-Pol-Roux died on October 13. Jacob didn’t hear about the attack for some weeks. At the end of the year, he wrote a letter of deep sympathy to Divine: December 30, 1940, in “Lettres à Saint-Pol-Roux,” Poésie présente, no. 44 (1982): 13–15, also in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 275–76. On November 5, 1940, he wrote Saint-Pol-Roux’s friend Paul Pelleau to thank him for providing more details about the horror and to encourage him to write a book about the poet—a task Pelleau did undertake. On January 10, 1941, Jacob wrote Lanoë a description of the assault. His short, formal commemoration of Saint-Pol-Roux’s “simplicity and greatness, noble resignation and dignity in poverty, goodness, and persistent charity” was published in 1941 in Tombeau de Saint-Pol-Roux (Brest: Commerce, 1941), 115, reprinted in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 277.

16. Hélène Henry, “Une paperasserie inestimable,” 59–61; Francis Deguilly, “Présentation du manuscrit,” 61–62; Francis Deguilly, “Note sur l’édition,” 62; and MJ, “Journal de guerre” 1940. Manuscrit 2244 in the Médiathèque d’Orléans, 63–88. All in Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 6 (2006). 

17. MJ, “Journal de guerre,” 72.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 77.

20. Ibid., 73–75.

21. Ibid., 78–79.

22. Jacob’s old companion the Benedictine Abbé Breut left Saint-Benoît in 1929 to be a parish priest in the Oise: Max Jacob écrit, 80n3. Saint-Benoît now had a new vicar.

23. MJ, “Journal de guerre,” 79.

24. MJ to Follain, July 16, 1940, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:243–44.

25. MJ to Béalu, June 10, 1940, in Béalu, Dernier visage, 193–94.

26. MJ to Manoll, August 21, 1940, in MJ, Lettres à Manoll, 65–66.

27. Béatrice Mousli, Max Jacob (Paris: Flammarion, 2005), 423. 

28. MJ to Manoll, August 2, 1940, in MJ, Lettres à Manoll, 63–64.

29. MJ to Manoll, August 21, 1940, ibid., 65–66.

30. MJ to Lanoë, September 2, 1940, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 375.

31. Jacob recounted this incident to Jean Colle on October 18, 1940, in MJ, Lettres à Colle, 35–36, as well as to André Salmon, March 19, 1941, in François Garnier, “Une création permanente: Le courrier de Max Jacob,” in Max Jacob et le Création, 150. He also told Lanoë about it, August 30, 1940, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë.

32. A week later, after the first Vichy anti-Semitic laws of October 3 and 4, Jacob told Lanoë not to bother finding him a hospice; Madame Persillard had agreed to keep him no matter what. But, he said, he couldn’t work, he felt so tormented. MJ to Lanoë, October 7, 1940, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 381.

33. MJ to Lanoë, September 2, 1940, ibid.

34. MJ to Paulhan, October 10, 1940, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 249.

35. MJ to Manoll, November 22, 1943, in MJ, Lettres à Manoll, 137–39.

36. MJ, “Reportage de juin 1940,” Confluences 2, no. 12 (July 1942): 7–10; DP, in O, 1557. The version in Confluences was dedicated to Paul Petit, who had by then been arrested for his role in the Resistance. The version in DP was dedicated to François de Montalivet. In a still later publication edited by Cadou, the poem was dedicated to Lanoë. Antonio Rodriguez describes in detail the different texts of the poem and the different ideologies of the anthologies in which it appeared. Antonio Rodriguez, “‘Reportage de juin 1940,’ un texte engagé?,” Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 9 (2009): 63–90.

37. MJ to Minet, January 10, 1940, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 111.

38. MJ to Jouhandeau, May 3, 1940, in MJ, Lettres à Jouhandeau, 349.

39. MJ to Jouhandeau, May 9, 1940, ibid., 350–52.

40. Winock, France et les Juifs, 218–21.

41. MJ to Montalivet, October 4, 1940, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:247–48. He also reported the requirement to register as a Jew to Louis Dumoulin, November 4, 1940, in Max Jacob écrit, 193.

42. MJ to Queneau, January 3, 1940, in MJ, “Lettres à Queneau,” 225–26.

43. MJ to Jean Colle, November 4, 1940, in MJ, Lettres à Colle, 37–38.

44. Cited by Hélène Henry in the introduction to the correspondence of Marcel Métivier, in Max Jacob écrit, 242.

45. R. O. Paxton, O. Corpet, and C. Paulhan, Archives de la vie littéraire sous l’occupation: À travers le désastre (Paris: Hatier, 1995), 34.

46. Ibid., 12–13. Martinoir, Littérature occupée, 32–35.

47. Martinoir, Littérature occupée, 32–33. Jacob’s publishers the Émile-Paul brothers made a notable exception: they joined the Resistance in the same group with Paulhan and Cassou. MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 257n4.

48. Gerhard Heller, Un allemand à Paris (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 26–27, 42–45.

49. Paxton, Corpet, and Paulhan, Archives, 110–11.

50. MJ to Lanoë, October 23, 1940, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 385.

51. MJ to Maurice Gouchault, November 19, 1940, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:254.

52. Details about food: MJ to “Mme L” in Quimper, December 26, 1940, in “Deux lettres inédites de Max Jacob,” Cahiers de l’Iroise 17, no. 2 (April–June 1970): 71–72.

53. MJ to Queneau, January 3, 1940, in MJ, “Lettres à Queneau,” 225–26.

54. MJ to Lanoë, January 10 and 13, 1940, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 403.

55. MJ to Jean Colle, November 14, 1940, in MJ, Lettres à Colle, 37–38. Jacob delicately doesn’t mention the reason for the liquidation sale and eviction of Gaston and Delphine. See Patricia Sustrac, “Étapes des persécutions contre Max Jacob et sa famille 1940–1944,” Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 9 (2009): 119. The expropriation of Jacques’s business began in October 1940, but administrative complications seem to have delayed the process. By April, the Germans “nullified” the sale and left Jacques penniless. Jacob described the situation to François de Montalivet, June 10, 1941, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:274–75.

56. MJ to Jacques-Émile Blanche, January 3, 1941, in Georges-Paul Collet, “Max Jacob et Jacques-Émile Blanche: Une confluence inattendue,” in Max Jacob à la confluence, 137.

57. Martinoir, Littérature occupée, 59.

58. MJ to Lanoë, February 4, 1941, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 411.

59. MJ to Montalivet, February 5, 1941, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:260.

60. Paxton, Corpet, and Paulhan, Archives, 288–95.

61. François Vignale, “Max Jacob, Max-Pol Fouchet, et la revue Fontaine,” Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 9 (2009): 96. 

62. MJ to Mespoulet, April 20, 23, and 24; May 14, 16, 1940, in Tatiana Greene, “Notice, en préambule aux lettres de Max Jacob,” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 4 (1981–82): 35–45.

63. MJ, “Sang-Esprit,” ibid., 41; HC, 35.

64. MJ to Lanoë, November 22, 1940, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 389.

65. In a letter on April 12, 1941, Jacob suggested the titles of the works to be shown. The exhibit was held at the Bourse in Nantes, June 7–22, since the museum was closed. On May 14, 1941, Jacob mentioned the “disagreeable adventures to be avoided”; he thanked Lanoë for the money on January 13, 1941, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 417.

66. MJ to Lanoë, February 4, 1941, ibid., 411. 

67. The French title is Post-scriptum aux Miettes philosophiques. MJ to Lanoë, February 4, 1941, ibid. His letters for the next few months brim with references to Kierkegaard.

68. MJ to Lanoë, April 12, 1941, ibid., 417.

69. Mgr. Charles Molette, Résistances chrétiennes à la nazification des esprits (Paris: François-Xavier de Guibert, 1998), 85.

70. La France continue, no. 7 (October 1941): n.p.

71. MJ to Lanoë, May 1 and 14, 1941, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 420–25.

72. MJ to Montalivet, March 20, 1941, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:267.

73. MJ to Manoll, March 19, 1941, in MJ, Lettres à Manoll, 81–83.

74. Louis Guillaume, “Max Jacob, le Quimpérois,” Simoun, no. 17–18 (1955): 52.

75. Ibid., 50.

76. MJ, Lettres à un jeune homme, 8.

77. MJ to Mezure, May 27, 1941, ibid., 31–33.

78. MJ to Mezure, June 19, 1941, ibid., 40–42.

79. MJ, Lettres à Levanti, 21–22.

80. MJ to Paulhan, May 1941, May 20 and June 21, 1941, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 251–57.

81. Émié, Dialogues, 160–61.

82. Manoll, Cadou, 54.

83. MJ, Lettres à Manoll, 22.

84. Marcel Béalu and René Guy Cadou, Correspondance 1941–1951 (Mortemart: Rougerie, 1979), 15.

85. This intense friendship is recorded in Béalu and Cadou, Correspondance, with drawings by Roger Toulouse, who was adopted as the artist of the group.

86. MJ to Jean Follain, May 30, 1933, in MJ, Amitiés, 1:311. 

87. Of all the Rochefort poets, Follain is the only one to have earned an international reputation. He has been beautifully translated into English by poets as diverse as William Merwin and Heather McHugh and was included by Mark Strand and Charles Simic in their anthology Another Republic (New York: Ecco Press, 1976).

88. MJ to Lacôte, April 24, 1937, in MJ, “Lettres à Lacôte,” 34–35. MJ to Dumoulin, March 9, 1943, in Max Jacob écrit, 226–27.

89. MJ to Manoll, May 10, 1941, in MJ, Lettres à Manoll, 86–87. Manoll at first “bitterly reproached” Cadou for signing up with Bouhier, Cadou wrote Béalu on May 28, 1941, in Béalu and Cadou, Correspondance, 29.

90. MJ to Paulhan, June 12, 1941, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 255. For a full account of the École de Rochefort, see Jean-Yves Debreuille, L’École de Rochefort: Théories et pratiques de la poésie, 1941–1961 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1987.

91. Annette Wieviorka and Michel Lafitte, À l’intérieur de camp de Drancy (Paris: Perrin, 2012), 23.

92. Winock, France et les Juifs, 222–24.

93. MJ to Paulhan, May 7, 1941, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 251.

94. MJ to Minet, May 20, 1941, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 115–16.

95. On “otitis”: MJ to Mezure, May 31 and June 19, 1941, in MJ, Lettres à un jeune homme, 40–42; MJ to Cadou, June 1, 1941, in Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 13–14 (2013): 276. He mentioned it also to Paulhan, June 19, 1941, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 257; and to François de Montalivet, June 21, 1941, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:275.

96. On the prophecies: MJ to Mezure, June 19, 1941, in in MJ, Lettres à un jeune homme, 40–42; MJ to Paulhan, June 19, 1941, MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 257; MJ to Montalivet, June 21, 1941, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:276.

97. MJ to Montalivet, June 10, 1941, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:274–75.

98. MJ to Montalivet, April 30, 1941, ibid., 2:238. The date given, 1940, is an error, like so much else in this edition; the arrest took place in 1941, as confirmed by Jacob’s letter to Paulhan, May 24, 1941, in MJ and Paulhan, Correspondance, 254.

99. Wieviorka and Lafitte, À l’intérieur, 19–27.

100. Poznanski, Peschanski, and Pouvreau, Drancy, 15–27. Wieviorka and Lafitte, À l’intérieur, 11–17.

101. Wieviorka and Lafitte, À l’intérieur, 36–45.

102. MJ to Lanoë, June 9 and 10, 1941, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 426–29. Jacob did know, however, about the camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. News of the monstrosities of Drancy leaked out only in mid-November, when the chief doctor of the prefecture obtained the release of one thousand severely ill men. Paul Petit published one of the only accounts of the conditions at Drancy in his clandestine paper, La France continue, in December 1941 (Poznanski, Peschanski, and Pouvreau, Drancy, 91). Jacob wrote to Lanoë on November 14, 1941, that the Gestapo officer who interviewed him on November 4 seemed to be hunting “the wife of a Jew concentrated at Pithiviers”: MJ, Lettres à Lanoë. The release of sick prisoners was an anomaly due to the temporary absence, in Berlin, of Theodor Dannecker, the head of the Gestapo Office of Jewish Affairs in Paris, who reported directly to Eichmann. When Dannecker returned on November 13, the “liberations” ceased, and the camp filled up again. 

103. O, 1692.

104. Ibid., 1713. Évrard got into serious trouble, after the war, for collaborating with the Vichy government. He gave his account of his exchanges with Jacob years later, in the English edition of Conseils à un jeune poète: MJ, Advice to a Young Poet, 34–39.

105. MJ to Manoll, June 1941, and July 16, 1941, in MJ, Lettres à Manoll, 94–97. MJ to Lanoë, July 12, 1941, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 433.

106. O, 1695.

107. On September 2, 1941, Jacob wrote Moricand explaining how much effort he had put into the visit to Montargis and stating that he remained faithful to the friendship in spite of “the difference in their principles.” MJ, Lettres 1920–1941, 130.

108. MJ to Manoll, September 3, 1941, in MJ, Lettres à Manoll, 98–99. Jacob wrote Marcel Métivier on August 25, 1941, excitedly about Moricand’s impending visit: Max Jacob écrit, 282. On July 12, 1941, Jacob asked Lanoë how to help Dr. Szigeti, who was threatened with losing the right to practice medicine, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë.

109. MJ to Rimbert, September 19, 1941, in MJ, Lettres à Rimbert, 83–84.

110. Guillaume’s visit: Béalu and Cadou, Correspondance, 49. MJ to Guillaume, in Guillaume, “Jacob, le Quimpérois,” 51.

111. Éluard, who was in touch with Jacob in this period, reported the findings: Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 262. Trillat was something of a medium; he was the uncle of the celebrated translator Marie-Odile Masek. By an odd coincidence, the second-hand copy of C that I purchased years ago turned out to have belonged to Trillat: he had signed his name on the inside cover. 

112. MJ, Lettres à un jeune homme, 58n37.

113. MJ to Mezure, October 8, 1941, ibid., 57–58.

114. MJ to Robert Zunz, November 22, 1941, in MJ, “Lettres à Zunz,” 934. MJ to Montalivet, October 8, 1941, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:288–89.

115. Jacob narrated the visit in detail to Lanoë, November 14, 1941, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 452; MJ to Montalivet, December 29, 1941, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:290–91; MJ to Cocteau, April 5, 1942, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 588–90. He mentioned it more cursorily to Mezure, October 28, 1943, in MJ, Lettres à un jeune homme, 128–29; MJ to Métivier, February 17, 1942, in Max Jacob écrit, 285–86; and MJ to Robert Zunz, November 22, 1941, in MJ, “Lettres à Zunz,” 934.

116. MJ to Béalu, November 29 and December 3, 1941, in Béalu, Dernier visage, 250–51. MJ to Lanoë, November 29, 1941, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 455.

117. MJ to the Montalivets, December 29, 1941, in MJ, Amitiés, 2:290.

118. MJ to Lanoë, December 31, 1941, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 457.

119. Poznanski, Peschanski, and Pouvreau, Drancy, 58–59. The rafle of December 12, 1941, captured 743 French Jews and 300 foreigners. The first shipment of 1,000 Jews to Auschwitz was prepared at Compiègne in mid-December but was held up for several months by logistical complications with the French railroads. Jacob’s cousin Roger Gompel avoided that transport and had the rare good fortune to be freed from Drancy on September 14, 1942.

120. Deportation: Wieviorka and Lafitte, À l’intérieur, 122. Olivier Zunz: “Note sur Robert Zunz et le monarchisme,” unpublished.

121. Accounts of his retreat: MJ to Métivier, February 17, 1942, in Max Jacob écrit, 285–86; letter of gratitude to the Texiers, n.d., in MJ, Lettres à Toulouse, 67. MJ to Lanoë, February 11, 1942, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 462. MJ to Moricand, February 16, 1942, in MJ, Lettres 1920–1941, 133, and Moricand, BnF.

122. Max Jacob écrit, 286n9.

123. Poznanski, Peschanski, and Pouvreau, Drancy, 94.

124. MJ to Moricand, February 16, 1942, in MJ, Lettres 1920–1941, 133.

125. Paulhan’s arrest: Paxton, Corpet, and Paulhan, Archives, 264. Cassou had been arrested earlier, on December 3, 1940, and was freed in February 1942: Debreuille, L’École de Rochefort, 51.

126. Moricand to MJ, February 28, 1942, in Moricand, BnF.

127. MJ to Lanoë, July 30, 1942, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 481.

128. MJ to Moricand, March 18, 1942, in MJ, Lettres 1920–1941, 134–35.

129. MJ to Moricand, March 26, 1942, ibid., 135–36.

130. Belaval, Rencontre, 53.

131. MJ to Salmon, April 30, 1942, in O, 96.

132. MJ to Madame Neveu, c. April 1942, in ms. n. acq. fr. 16799, BnF.

133. The articles in Wikipedia on Paul Petit erroneously claim that he was beheaded. He was shot. See his posthumous book, a collection of his resistance essays, Résistance spirituelle (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), with the introductory poem by his friend Paul Claudel.

134. Wieviorka and Lafitte, À l’intérieur, 151. Poznanski, Peschanski, and Pouvreau, Drancy, 154.

135. MJ to Moricand, July 18, 1942, in MJ, Lettres 1920–1941, 137.

136. MJ, “Amour du Prochain,” dated August 1942. This version was published in L’éternelle revue, no. 1, new ser. (December 1, 1944): 37, under the title “L’étoile jaune des juifs.” With slight variations it appeared in DP under the title “L’Amour du prochain,” in O, 1599. Jean Rousselot published a version lineated as free verse in his Max Jacob au sérieux (Rodez: Éditions Subervie, 1958), 200.

137. Seven of the poems were collected in the posthumous AE: “Amour en Dieu,” “Déshabillement et mort de Dieu,” “Flagellation, Etc.,” “La Grâce,” “La Lutte avec L’ange,” “Mains éclatées, grenades de la fécondité,” and “Portement de croix.”

138. Jean Rousselot, Max Jacob: L’homme qui faisait penser à Dieu (Paris: Laffont, 1946), 29–34. Rousselot wrote a longer, critical study of Jacob, Max Jacob au sérieux.

139. Rousselot, Max Jacob: L’homme, 16.

140. Henri Dion, “Témoignage: Max Jacob et la basilique de Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire ou ‘La Maison de Dieu,’” Centre de recherches Max Jacob, no. 5 (1983): 39–44.

141. Henri Dion, interview by author.

142. MJ to Frank, December 1942, in MJ, Lettres à Frank, 186–87. MJ to Lanoë, June 3, 1942, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 477.

143. MJ to Lanoë, February 11, 1942, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 462.

144. MJ to Mezure, July 26, 1942, in MJ, Lettres à un jeune homme, 96.

145. MJ to Lanoë, July 30, 1942, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 481.

146. Jean Cocteau, Journal 1942–1945 (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 335. Entry for August 18, 1943.

147. Jean Cocteau, “Salut à Breker,” Comoedia, May 23, 1942, 1.

148. Lucien Combelle, “Les Jeux sont faits,” Révolution nationale, July 17, 1943, 1.

149. MJ to Madame Neveu, December 1942 (no. 57); December 27, 1943 (no. 58), in ms. n. acq. fr. 16799, BnF. MJ to Lanoë, December 31, 1942, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 487.

150. O, 97.

151. MJ to Métivier, June 8, 1943, in Max Jacob écrit, 298.

152. MJ to Dumoulin, March 9, 1943, ibid., 226–27.

153. MJ to Manoll, January 9, 1943, in MJ, Lettres à Manoll, 123–24.

154. MJ to Lanoë, October 9, 1943, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 502. Cadou’s escape: Béalu and Cadou, Correspondance, 100.

155. Max Jacob écrit, note by Patricia Sustrac, 228n4.

156. Jacques Lesage later said that Jacob’s maxims had truly influenced him. Unlike Conseils à un jeune poète, this notebook was concerned only with ethics, not poetry. After Jacob’s death, Béalu published this notebook as Conseils à un étudiant (Advice for a Student), in O, 1717–19. 

157. MJ to Mezure, January 5, 1944, in MJ, Lettres à un jeune homme, 130–31.

158. MJ to Lanoë, January 25, 1943, in MJ, Lettres à Lanoë, 511.

159. MJ to Cocteau, January 20, 1944, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 597–98. MJ to Misia Sert, n.d., in Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, Misia (New York: Knopf, 1980), 283. MJ to Minet, January 25, 1944, in MJ, Lettres à Minet, 116–17.

160. MJ to Cocteau, February 2, 1944, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 599. Jacob also cited the reply in a letter to Szigeti, February 2, 1944, quoted by Sustrac in “Étapes des persécutions,” 121. Jacob quoted it to Béalu, February 2, 1944, in Béalu, Dernier visage, 332–33.

161. It was the French prime minister, Pierre Laval, who insisted on the deportation of children. Eichmann agreed. Wieviorka and Lafitte, A l’intérieur, 165.

162. Sustrac, “Étapes des persécutions,” 121.

163. MJ to Béalu, February 2, 1944, in Béalu, Dernier visage, 332–33.

164. Ibid., 74–81.

165. Details about the dinner with the Durands and Ash Wednesday: Pierre Andreu, “Les derniers jours de Max Jacob,” Cahiers de l’Iroise 23, no. 1, new ser. (January–March 1985): 8.

166. Béalu, Dernier visage, 82.

167. Ibid., 81–83. Detail about Madame Persillard and the quilt: Rousselot, Max Jacob: L’homme, 159.

168. Cocteau’s letter: ms. 2513, Médiathèque d’Orléans. Sustrac, “Étapes des persécutions,” 122.

169. MJ, Lettres à Goldblatt, 37.

170. Rousselot, Max Jacob: L’homme, 160.

171. MJ to Cocteau, February 29(actually February 28), 1944, in MJ and Cocteau, Correspondance, 600.

172. MJ, Lettres à Goldblatt, 38.

173. MJ to Moricand, February 28, 1944, in Moricand, BnF.

174. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 274.

175. Sustrac, “Étapes des persécutions,” 122.

176. MJ, Lettres à Goldblatt, 38.

177. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 274. Seckel thoroughly documents the evidence of the multiple efforts to help Jacob.

178. Patricia Sustrac, “La Mort de Max Jacob: Réalité et représentations,” Cahiers Max Jacob, no. 9 (2009): 105. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 276–77n28.

179. Heller, Un allemand, 183.

180. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 278n38, quoting Youki Desnos, Confidences de Youki (Paris: Fayard, 1957), 217–18.

181. Henri Sauguet, interview by author. Sauguet reported the remark widely. It has been repeated in various versions and was put in the worst possible light by Andreu in Vie et mort, 292–93.

182. See Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 275, for a thorough review of the case.

183. Moricand to Briant, March 5, 1944, in MJ, Lettres 1920–1941, 150–52.

184. Sustrac, “La Mort de Max Jacob,” 105.

185. Misia Sert’s claim was repeated in her biography: Gold and Fizdale, Misia, 283. Sustrac, “La Mort de Max Jacob,” 105.

186. Sustrac, “La Mort de Max Jacob,” 126n24.

187. Yvette Delétang-Tardif, “La Mort d’un poète,” Poésie 44, no. 20 (October 1944). Cited in Andreu, Vie et mort, 294, and in MJ, Lettres à Goldblatt, 44. This doctor wished to remain anonymous. The narrative is a bit suspect and seems romanticized; it is not true, as the witness claimed, that the fellow prisoners had no idea who Jacob was.

188. Dr. Weille to Hélène Henry, February 22, 1993, in Archives of Les Amis de Max Jacob. Cited by Sustrac, “La Mort de Max Jacob,” 127n29.

189. Julien J. London, “Témoignage sur l’agonie d’un poète,” Candide, October 19–26, 1961.

190. Sustrac, “La Mort de Max Jacob,” 123.

191. Sustrac, “Étapes des persécutions,” 123.

192. Sustrac, “La Mort de Max Jacob,” 106.

193. Dr. Albert Buesche to Roger Toulouse, March 4, 1944, in MJ, Lettres à Toulouse, 101.

194. Sustrac, “Étapes des persécutions,” 123. It was called the fosse commune, a mass grave, but it was a separate grave, identifiable on a map of the cemetery.

195. Rousselot, Max Jacob: L’homme, 166–68. Sustrac, “Étapes des persécutions,” 123. There is minor disagreement in these memoirs about who alerted whom. 

196. Cocteau, Journal 1942–1945, 486–87.

197. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 273, 279n51.

198. Ibid., 118. The book is now in the Médiathèque d’Orléans. Colle’s visit to Jacob’s room is described in letters from Pierre Colle to Jean Colle, March 16 and 21, 1944, in MJ, Lettres à Colle, 70–72.

199. Pierre Colle to Jean Colle, March 21, 1944, in MJ, Lettres à Colle, 71–72.

200. In his biography of Jacob in 1982, Andreu insisted that Picasso hadn’t come. See Seckel’s discussion and evidence to the contrary, Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 276.

201. Andreu, who never forgave Picasso his crack about Max flying over the wall by himself, accused him of not attending the mass. Andreu, Vie et mort, 293. But as Seckel notes, plenty of witnesses reported Picasso’s presence. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 276. Pierre Colle described the mass to his father on March 21, 1944, in MJ, Lettres à Colle, 71–72.

202. Seckel, Jacob et Picasso, 276.

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