Le poète en vacances à l’été 1913

In the summer of 1913, the Intransigeant ’s irreverent chroniclers of literary life, Les Treize , asked fellow authors to share their holiday plans with the newspaper’s readers. The initial responses supplied information on lengthy projects said to be advancing toward completion in favorable writing conditions, away from usual constraints for some and deadlines for others. After the Intransigeant ’s publication of a quatrain Apollinaire sent by postcard, the format of the submissions changed and poets began a friendly contest to outdo one another in verse composition ostensibly related to monuments or sites of literary history encountered over the summer, while also anchored in the language of the game and its participants. The seasonal rhymesters included André Billy, Roger Allard, Louis de Gonzague Frick, Gaston Picard, Jacques Dyssord, Fagus, Lucien Rolmer, Fernand Divoire (founder of Les Treize ), and Paul Fort who devised a patchwork from the poetic heritage; even the fictitious Georges-Merize entered the fray with a quatrain in Gil Blas that mirrored Apollinaire’s summer sky. The vacation stanzas from 1913 may be read in contrast to the impending wartime lives and writings of the poets, a blue horizon of a different hue.