Francis’s other projects did not always proceed on the same basis of familiarity. Some would take time to reveal themselves to him. He recorded his thoughts on this in the notes he made of an interview made during lunch at the Café d’Orsay in late 1957 with the poet Pierre Reverdy, whom he had approached in relation to his planned next project on Apollinaire:

I told him how I regard my writing. Like all writers I have things to say, and sometimes these things take the form of a novel, sometimes the form of a biography, or what people call a biography. But I don’t consider myself a biographer de métier. For some reason I find it hard to speak directly, as do writers of novels; perhaps it’s timidy [sic]—I hide behind other people and speak through their mouths. These have to be people capable of expressing my thoughts, preferences, ideals, etc. they are people I come across in my reading—usually by chance. (During this he kept nodding sympathetically, patting my arm—he interrupted only to object to my statement that I “hid” behind other people: “No, he said, you simply express yourself through them.”) At present I don’t know whether Apollinaire is one of those people or not. If I don’t know that he is, I will write nothing about him.

He said, “You are capable of knowing who and what you are—most people are not capable of this—so your decision will be the right one. Your book will probably take a form that you have no idea of in advance, and you will not understand what is happening or why it is happening. That is the only true artistic creation.”

Never in the world, he said, would he have spoken with me this way—“as if we had been friends for twenty years”—if he hadn’t felt about me in a certain way …

I thanked him, told him he’d given me courage, his talk had been precious to me, and had been utterly different from anything I’d imagined in advance. He told me that was the greatest compliment I could pay him.