Short-listed for the 1988 Governor General's Literary Award for
Fiction, Ottawa-Carleton Book Award and Trillium Book Award
Paris, the City of Light, was once the scene of a brilliant magnesium
flare, host to the belle epoque from 1900 to 1914. Tempting poets,
painters, writers, and composers from across Europe, the city relied on
one man to move among them all-Guillaume Apollinaire. His contemporaries
called him brilliant, mad, whimsical. He was the bastard son of an
Italian cavalry officer and a Polish woman addicted to gambling, but
nevertheless let it be rumoured around Paris that he was the son of the
pope.