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.