Ferdinand Roybet’s etching of a wandering rural circus troupe foreshadows the iconography of Apollinaire’s poem and also reveals how common this romantic imagery had become. The theme of travelling performers who moved about the countryside like gypsies with their props, animals, andfamily in tow, was popular among artists and writers in France in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Although Picasso and Apollinaire were mainly acquainted with urban street performers or entertainers whom they met at the Medrano Circus, they frequently constructed images that evoked such older representations of wandering rural performers.