Guillaume APOLLINAIRE. Autograph letter signed "Wilhelm Kost - Lot 1

Guillaume APOLLINAIRE. Autograph letter signed "Wilhelm Kostrowitzky", Neu Glück Saturday, September 14, 1901, to his mother; 4 pages in-8 (18 x .3 cm, Waterford watermark). Beautiful letter to his mother at the beginning of his stay in Germany. [Hired as Gabrielle de Milhau's tutor, he is about to fall in love with Annie Playden, Gabrielle's English governess]. "My dear Maman I see you are very angry with me. I really don't have much time to myself, and when I'm in Cologne or Bonn I have no paper and often no pen at my disposal. The weather is very bad. As the story of my journey is very long, I'm going to tell it in stages. As far as Coulommiers, I traveled with peasant women. Michaux was waiting for me at the station. We slept in a room with two beds, as we always did, because they always refused to give us anything else. In Coulommiers, there was nothing special except Decauville cheeses, and automobiles too. Mad. de M. [Milhau] was at the Hôtel de l'Ours, where she met Oury, who deals with automobiles and gave her the itinerary for the Paris-Berlin race [ ] The next day we left; after passing through La Ferté-Gaucher we had lunch in Montmirail, then we saw Epernay, which is a beautiful, rather sad town, and the whole Champagne region with its vineyards, the Château de Montmort, Rheims, where we visited the cathedral. Champagne looks exactly like it does on the posters - the vines are 50 centimetres above the ground, so the grapes weren't ripe. Rheims Cathedral is magnificent, but under repair. I saw the house where Joan of Arc lived with her parents during the coronation. [ ] We had to go all the way to Rethel in the Ardennes"... In his next letter, he will recount the journey to Trier. "La Grande France has just published some of my verses in its September issue. He hopes to see his brother Albert when he visits Cologne: "The shops there are more beautiful than in Paris, the boulevards are magnificent, the port is enormous, and the Dom is a marvel. Bonn is very quiet and rather sad. The whole Rhine region is reminiscent of the Riviera between Cannes and Menton. Life there is much more expensive. My pension is extraordinarily cheap for the country and it's the only house where I can eat, and they're really annoyed to have me, because the woman who has to cook for me can't drive the ox to the fields. There are no poor people in this country, beggars are unknown. [ ] One of these days I might even go to Aachen and Frankfurt, and maybe once to Carlsruhe [ ] The Sieg is a river and Kreis means canton. The main town is Siegburg, a small town I once passed through, which resembles Mont S t Michel in France, with the town below and a former convent, now a prison, on the mountain [ ] Gefängnitz I'm starting to get the hang of German, but still badly. Everything chic here is French, and we use a lot of French words, such as "logis", "laitages", etc. The hairdressers call themselves "friseur" instead of spoken English. Brasserie menus are half French cabliau (for cod) mit cartoffeln, suppe mit cartoffeln, rôti mit cartoffeln etc. You can still see liqueure. [ ] Je t'embrasse " Unpublished letter