The legend of Guillaume Apollinaire— jovial, manic, lewd, charismatic, Roman-nosed Apollinaire—is as potent as his work. He was born Wilhelm Albert Wladimir Alexandre Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky in Rome in 1880. His mother, Angelica Alexandrina de Kostrowitzky, was a Polish adventuress who liked to claim noble blood; his father, probably, was an Italian army officer named Francesco-Costantino-Camillo Flugi d’Aspermont, whose rich Catholic family disdained Angelica. (These murky passages have a faint flavor of Stendhal.) The boy spent his first seven years in Roman squalor until his mother, with Wilhelm and a younger brother in tow, moved to Monaco to become a “hostess” at the casino. It was thus fortuitous that the boy got a French education at all, for only in 1861 had Monaco reverted to being a French protectorate.

From 1888 to 1897 the youngster was a star pupil at Catholic boarding schools in Monaco and Cannes, taking his first communion and writing his first verses in 1892. (Now things acquire more the flavor of Humbert Humbert’s childhood.) He transferred to a public lycée in Nice in 1897 but failed his bac. By seventeen, he had lost his faith, had sex, and, in the words of Scott Bates, “acquired an extraordinary knowledge of fin-de-siècleesoteric, erotic, and revolutionary literature.” Obliged by the authorities to leave Monaco, his mother and her new protector, the Alsatian banker and gambler Jules Weil, moved the ménage north in 1899—first to a gambling spa near Stavelot in Belgium and eventually to Paris.