[March 8, 1927]

My dear friend,

I am sending you a note to add to the paper that I had given to you by Robert Aron. I hope you like this paper. For my part, I attach quite great importance to it. I've wanted to write this for a long time. 
This paper must appear at all costs, I have a certain number of things in mind and I would be willing to sacrifice everything else, to accept all the changes that you propose to me in order for these things to appear. I think it matters not only to me but to many people that a similar article is published: we need deliverance. 
I will spend tomorrow evening Wednesday at the review, 
Kind regards,

Antonin Artaud

<figure><img src="/images/divers/artaud-a-paulhan-besoin-delivrance.webp" alt=""></figure>

_Following his exclusion from the surrealist movement on November 23, 1926, Artaud addressed Jean Paulhan so that it could appear in the_ N.R.F. _his text_ The Barbarians, _by which he intends to settle his score with surrealism. Paulhan refused publication [by replying](/sur-paulhan/le-bouquet-de-violettes-de-jean-paulhan#reponse-paulhan-a-artaud): “be careful that by being too absolutely rebellious against your friends, you diminish yourself.” The pamphlet will not appear in the_ N.R.F. _nor elsewhere: "I had made of these fragments (of texts on the surrealists) the material for an article which was successively refused to me by two or three magazines, including the_ N.R.F. _as too compromising", he will remember. He will publish _ À la grande nuit ou Le Bluff Surrealiste _ on his own in June 1927_. 
(R. Loureau, "An author-publisher couple: Antonin Artaud and the N.R.F.", in _L'Homme et la Société_, 1984, vol. 73, n° 1, p. 191-193.)

Letter from Antonin Artaud to Jean Paulhan

([Published in La Révolution Surréaliste n°11, March 15, 1928](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5845163f/f33.item))

Paris, 3, rue de Grenelle (VIe).

Jean Paulhan,

After the explanations to which I gave myself in your presence on the subject of this obscene Claudel, in consideration of the services rendered and of a friendship that is infinitely torn and troubled, but finally sometimes effective, reducing my indictment to the simplicity of the two points to which your letter testifies, is pure and simple smut but which does not disfigure you, on the contrary.

This rascality distances me from you, and what's more, it judges you and highlights your ease.

Because the man I saw rolling his head on his chest in the absolute inability to answer a specific question, like the child who slips away (so Jean Paulhan, you are the child, if you are the child you have to say it so that we know), this man obliged to constantly regain grip on his own nothingness cannot reproach me for any ease, any absence of soul.

I will not add any insult to the description of your attitude. It takes a lot more, believe me, to make me doubt myself. I know where I hurt but it is not this small part of my mind that Jean Paulhan can reach.

ANTONIN ARTAUD

P.-S. – Regarding the Jarry demonstration, it is the very principle of theater that your collaborator calls into question in the February issue of the N. R. F. But the Jarry theater has nothing to do with theater. All this, therefore, does not interest us. So I won't respond to your stupid colleague. As for the meaning and principle of a manifestation like this, here is what I will agree to say about it:  
I do with a text exactly what I please. But a text on a stage is always a poor thing. So I embellish it with screams and contortions which have a natural meaning, but which are not for pigs. I am therefore not surprised that the dwarf who signs these reviews saw a similar performance as a modern comedy piece.

Another reason why I'm afraid to give you my answer is that I would have to expose myself to one of those long and broad castrations of texts, strewn with broken sentences and words reduced to the expression of a hair, to which you have accustomed us.


Letter from Artaud to Paulhan published in La Révolution Surréaliste

Surrealist activity has just gone through a crisis which must end. In the absence of any external manifestation of this activity, equivocations, tendentious interpretations, hasty conclusions were inevitable. If the time seems ripe to denounce them, it is because in their variety, the set of arguments that are presented to us is such that we will only have to face them to make our true situation objective. We will not fail to find new on our part this concern for what will be said. It's very bad to know us. We have always made it our duty to characterize our moral attitude as clearly as possible at all times. This is still what it is about, and this only: in vain, in the texts which follow will we seek the expression of poetic or political concerns, depending on the kind of interest that each one has in us. We will not deal with it here. If we bring together these few letters, it is, on the one hand, that practically we see here an advantage in their different recipients being able to compare them. On the other hand, it is easy to understand that beyond these occasional recipients whom we consider differently, we have in view, more than their individuals, the general theses that they support. Therefore, the publication of this file aims to put the documents of the trial in the hands of anyone interested in the moral basis of our actions.

In the name of a certain principle of honesty which must, according to us, come before all others, in November 1926, we broke up with two of our former collaborators: Artaud, Soupault. The remarkable lack of rigor that they brought among us, the obvious contradiction implied, as far as each of them was concerned, by the isolated pursuit of the stupid literary adventure, the abuse of trust of which each of them was in some capacity zealous, had been the object of our tolerance for too long. In no time, we are done, for the second with this incomprehensible darting, for the first... ([1](#f1)). At a time when for each of us it was important to condition, really to condition, the surrealist action, unanimously aware of its revolutionary goal, and for this to assign to this action the exact limits that it entails, limits which, revolutionary speaking, are not imaginary but real, we only had to consider these two defections. If, moreover, and only depending on our respective moods, we did not all believe it necessary to join the Communist Party, at least none of us took it upon ourselves to deny the great concordance of aspirations which exists between the communists and it. In their ranks, whatever day he set for returning to his post, without it being too late, no one wanted to let people believe that he would not be found. We are sure enough of each other now that we don't have to wait for each other. But it is here of a first attempt at recognition, accomplished by five of us, that we would like to report. Perhaps it is about the orientation of some future men, who will like to be kept informed of certain of our initiatives and will judge them without bias. After all, it can be as edifying as the story of a trip to Soviet Russia. Without any dogmatism, and by only trying to take the words on the spot, thanks to what several letters dated the same day allow us to think, we hope to give the measure of our current means, to make people appreciate what an effort of accommodation is worth to us such, in any case, as we have never made, to have recognized this will which we know and which nothing is about to destroy.

We would begrudge ourselves not to be more explicit about Artaud; it is demonstrated that he has only ever obeyed the lowest motives. He vacillated among us to the point of nausea, to the point of nausea, using literary tricks that he had not invented, creating in a new field the most repugnant of clichés.

We have wanted to confuse him for a long time, convinced that a real bestiality was driving him. That he only wanted to see in the Revolution a metamorphosis of the interior conditions of the soul, which is characteristic of the mentally deficient, the powerless and the cowardly. Never, in any field whatsoever, was his activity (he was also a film actor) anything other than a concession to nothingness. We saw him live for two years on the simple utterance of a few terms to which he was incapable of adding anything living. He did not conceive or recognize any matter other than “the matter of his mind,” as he said. Let's leave him to his detestable mixture of daydreams, vague assertions, gratuitous insolence, manias. His hatreds - and undoubtedly currently his hatred of surrealism - are hatreds without dignity. He could only decide to strike if he was fully assured that he could do so without danger or consequences. It is pleasant to note, among other things, that this enemy of literature and the arts has only ever known how to intervene on occasions when his literary interests were at stake, that his choice has always fallen on the most derisory objects, where nothing essential to the spirit or to life was at stake. Today, we have vomited this scoundrel. We do not see why this carrion would delay any longer in converting, or, as she would no doubt say, in declaring herself Christian.

---

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;1 - Soupault: The Good Apostle, Heart of Gold, etc. [↩](#a1)

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See also [Jean Guérin's note](/textes/jean-guerin#a-la-grande-nuit) on Artaud's response to the surrealists.

In broad daylight

(_Foreword published at the opening of the first issue of Le Grand Jeu, Summer 1928_)

_The Great Game_ is irremediable; it is only played once. We want to play it every moment of our lives. It's still "he who loses wins". Because it’s about getting lost. We want to win. Now, the Great Game is a game of chance, that is to say, of skill, or better of "grace": the grace of God, and the grace of gestures.

Having grace is a matter of attitude and talisman. Seeking the favorable attitude and the sign that forces the worlds is our goal. Because we believe in all miracles. Attitude: you must put yourself in a state of complete receptivity, to do this you must be pure, you must have emptied yourself. _Hence our ideal tendency to question everything at all times_. A certain habit of this emptiness shapes our minds from day to day. An immense surge of innocence has broken down for all of us the frameworks of constraints that a social being is accustomed to accepting. We do not accept because we no longer understand. No more rights than duties and their so-called vital necessities. Faced with these corpses, we gradually foresee a new ethic which will be constructed in these pages. On the level of human morality, the perpetual changes in our future only demand _the right to what they call cowardice_. And it's not just to use it for us. This cowardice is only caused by our good faith; we are sincere actors. When we walk, there are within us men who look at each other, who follow in step, who crawl below, fly above, get ahead of each other, flee from each other, cheer, boo and look at each other impassively. But then we only want to be the action of walking. This is why we are sincere actors. Bad are those who do not give themselves entirely to their choice. We simply have a sense of action.

Why do we write? _We don't want to write, we let ourselves be written_. It is also to recognize ourselves and each other: I look at myself in a mirror every morning to create a human figure with a long-term identity. Without mirrors I would have the faces of the changing beasts of my desires, and, on certain days when the miracle touches me, I would no longer have a face. For, delivered, we are both brutes brandishing the amulets of their sex and blood instincts, and also the gods who seek through their confusion to form an infinite total. The “homo sapiens” compromise fades between the two. Discursive knowledge and the human sciences only interest us as long as they serve our immediate needs. _All the great mystics of all religions would be ours_ if they had broken the _shackles of their religions which we cannot endure_.

_We will always give ourselves with all our strength to all new revolutions_. Changes in ministry or regime do not matter to us. We attach to the very act of revolt a power capable of many miracles.

Also _we are not individualists_: instead of locking ourselves in our past, we all walk united together, each carrying their own corpse on their back.

This is our last act together; art, literature are only means for us.

The grace linked to the attitude needs, as we have said, talismans which communicate to it their powers, foods which nourish its life. One of us recently said that his mind was primarily looking for food. Among his sensations he seeks above all that which can nourish him. In vain his hunger drags himself from museums to libraries. But a spectacle, seemingly insignificant, suddenly gives him food (a fence, a living oyster). The overwhelming sensation of an instant suddenly restored incalculable strength to his troubled life.

It is these eternal moments that we seek everywhere, that our texts, our drawings will perhaps give rise to in some, that they often gave to their creators in the shock of their discoveries and for which our essays seek the recipes.

It is in such moments that we will absorb everything, that we will swallow God to become transparent until we disappear.

R. Gilbert-Lecomte.

In complete agreement: Hendrik Carmer — René Daumal — Artür Harfaux — Maurice Henry — Pierre Minet — A. Rolland de Renéville — Josef Sima — Roger Vailland.

---

_We announce for the next issues_:

STUDY ON RIMBAUD

UNITY OF DREAMS: Coincidence of everything.  
Attempt at union to establish the objective value of the dream and its unique substance.

WHAT ABOUT HAPPINESS?  
Investigation into the value of Happiness for those who play the Great Game.

THE MYSTICS AND US

OUR ENTRY INTO MEN  
Are we obliged to participate in social movements?  
Which political party allows the Great Game?


Foreword

Sketch of a double portrait of Léon Pierre-Quint and Jean Paulhan as game masters

It is undoubtedly not by chance that, while I was re-opening, after ten years, _Les Chants de Maldoror_, the news of the death of Roger-Gilbert Lecomte came to strike me. It was he who, once upon a time, passionately read aloud to me so many of Lautréamont's stanzas and inspired the work I dedicated to this poet: my book was dedicated to him. In returning to the _Chants_ these days, I heard his voice, clear or violent, soft or stormy, come back to life as an accompaniment which gave this poetry its right intonation. My ear, like a record, had recorded it: he spoke before my eyes, which brought back his image. However, he was dead; he is dead. And my loneliness increases further...  
In one of his most beautiful _Songs_, Maldoror, evil genius, sensitive to pity, evokes the image of the closed bourgeoisie, fiercely faithful to its principles. On the roof of an omnibus sit “men... their eyes motionless like those of a dead fish, pressed against each other and who appear to have lost their lives”. Moreover, adds the poet, “the regulatory number is not exceeded”. Behind the omnibus, running after, a small child. — “Stop... I beg you. I have not eaten since yesterday... [Give me] a place... I am a little child of eight years old and I trust in you.” But on the imperial car, everyone nudges their neighbor: one complains about these “Argentinian-toned” moans, the other imperceptibly lowers his head to plunge back into the immobility of his selfishness. The next day, a rag picker picked up the body of the child "with sore little legs" from the dust. This appears to me to be the fate of Roger-Gilbert Lecomte, abandoned by his parents, by his friends, and died in hospital at the age of 35, in pain and distress.  
He was indeed, throughout his existence, the one who ran behind the entire omnibus. He had not accepted life; he had always said: — No, to life. He really remained a little child: he adored childhood and his own. Long after his grandmother's death, he still felt like his grandson and retained a veneration for her. He believed in fairies, magicians, angels. Roger-Gilbert Lecomte had light blue eyes, limpid, of harsh purity, a sensual mouth, a very straight nose, an androgynous oval face and a long, thin body. He lived in an inner world, which he had extended beyond birth, supported with his philosophical and occultist notions and which he deepened throughout his adolescence. It was only within this prenatal vision, distant and for him magnificent, that he felt possible happiness. This being, strong in thought, but frail and weak, who was not made for this earth, lived between the two greatest warlike cataclysms in history. In 1914, at the age of 7, he fled haggard, through the streets, clinging to his mother's arm, from Reims being bombed and in flames. In Paris, in 1942, he suddenly found himself in prison, where he also almost died. He believed himself cursed, and also hampered by a hereditary family fate. I knew him, around 1925, through Pierre Minet, then aged fifteen, who had fallen from the sky of Reims, came alone to Paris and who, like illustrious examples, read his poems to the first person who came and then asked, without thanking, ten francs for dinner. Pierre Minet immediately explained to me: “No... I don’t do anything in life, but I have my “brothers”; they are called “the simple ones”. They are enough for me. They are everything to me. Neither would hesitate to die for the other.” These, still high school students in Reims, were called: Roger Vaillant, René Daumal, Roger-Gilbert Lecomte; soon came to them Rolland de Renéville and some others. They formed the team of the magazine _Le Grand Jeu_, whose issues, published shortly after the surrealist movement, through their intransigence and their revelations on modern poetry, exerted a certain influence on the generation of this time. Lecomte was the animator. His name is part of the literary history of the moment. Among his brothers, he was admired for his beauty, the provocative bad taste of his attire as well as for his exalted love of pain. He felt like he was carrying an extraordinary message. For a few years, at the age of adolescent perfection, he was fully himself. In the midst of the multiple clans following the war, in the confusion of the time, he distinguished, with exceptional clairvoyance, from Villon to the present day, the true poets, the proponents of a lineage on the subject of which there is now almost unanimous agreement among the most opposing minds. He was then the first to publish Arthur Rimbaud's _Correspondance littéraire_, preceded by a dazzling preface. Few people have lived as intensely as he in poetry. Through his intense mysticism, he contributed, with his friends, to the more complete rupture of literary traditions, to the search for absolute poetic moments, to the belief that these must express a profound transcendent reality, the unconscious impulse of the poet calling him, projecting him beyond life. The image of inspiration was taken literally.  
However, Lecomte believed he was demeaning himself by indulging in criticism. He preferred to reign in his group. Some minds are perhaps made to inspire rather than to create, nature not having gifted them with the concentration necessary for expression. The little he wrote remains characteristic and nothing mediocre ever came from his pen. Lecomte leaves two small collections of poems: _Life, Death, Love, the Void and the Wind_ (Cahiers Libres 1927) and a very moving booklet of barely 8 pages (1935), published, under the aegis of Paulhan, already at the time of his suffering, —&nbsp;and above all an unpublished novel: _Retour à Tout_, imagined from adolescence and which it was brought to live painfully without ever being able to finish writing it. A man, out of disgust with existence and society, patiently strives to reject everything that education and teaching have taught him: he systematically practices forgetting history, proper names, dates, days of the week, numbers. He unlearns to read and the signs of writing are soon nothing more than incomprehensible black spots on a white background, like blurred cinema images for a spectator placed too close to the screen. He takes a further step backward, to sink into the great Whole and no longer knows how to use his arms, nor walk, nor eat; he can no longer leave his miserable room and his body begins to melt... The negative effort pursued with a rage of destructive determination finally results: one day, the cleaning lady, upon entering the room, finds only a small mass of agglutinated gelatin on the floor. But this slow and total disintegration of the individual should ideally return him to some marvelous previous state. The mind never settles in immobility: when it does not admit progress, a future paradise, it imagines a golden age, a lost Eden. _Return to Everything_ corresponded to a general conception, but above all to a negation of current civilization and science: the author saw, like Maldoror, in nature and society only slaughter and catastrophes, love linked to sadism, absurd stupidity to constantly resurgent wickedness...

However, Roger-Gilbert Lecomte really experienced this rejection of the present, this violent contempt of the era. From the moment he left adolescence, he was no longer able to progress. This was his tragedy. The fact of becoming a man, with responsibilities, always seemed inconceivable to him. He did not adapt to any profession; as a writer, could never do press service. He had become disgusted with work, among men, and no longer saw a place to take: “O stupid and idiotic race” he exclaimed with Lautréamont. He preferred the consolation of the humble and “unfortunate toad”. Rarely have I seen a person have so much difficulty acting in daily life. At 18, the simple prospect of entering a store to get a piece of bread or ham seemed so painful and repugnant to him that he would have preferred, like his character, to starve to death. Chatting with a merchant made him blush like a girl and shake like a bell. Faced with such distress, his friends had accustomed him to avoid these worries. He was then loved by them as a child, as a young god and admired as a being made of purer material than the others. But his friends evolved. He remained locked in his revolt. His hatred was expressed in imprecations against society, its laws, its capital, its prisons, its beggars, obligatory military service, obligatory work, obligatory salutes, obligatory bowing. Like a moth lost by the light of a room, he encountered obstacles at every angle and was irritated by obstacles. Absolute revolt can only be the attitude of a moment of paroxysm. Prolonged, it leads to suicide or renunciation. Conscience then became an unbearable weight for him.  
“Ah! To think is unworthy since it is pure waste” (Rimbaud). Material life was becoming a dead end. All he had to do was escape, through passion, gambling or drugs. It was the drug. It brought him, at the same time as unconsciousness, torture in his flesh and moral decay. It lost its radiance; his intelligence ruminated. His “brothers”, one by one, left him, with sadness. He never complained and never showed any bitterness. Wasn't his ordeal foreshadowed in _Return to Everything_? He lived in miserable garrison. Detoxification treatments followed in vain. He got drunk at night; he slept during the day. He no longer worked, but, by sometimes postponing his projects into the future, pitifully sought to delude himself. He was already dead to himself and to his loved ones, to those who loved him most. He then completely disappeared into drugs. Any exclusive passion is an impossible challenge to keep. When you have a fever of 41°, writes Goethe in “Werther”, there is no point in saying to the patient: “You should get better!” » As he had retained his gentleness and goodness, women from the neighborhood had adopted him in recent months and sometimes carried out delicate errands for him. He found a new friend who devoted himself. His agony was a paroxysm of horror. In 48 hours, in the hospital, tetanus won. A few days earlier, he had felt pain, which foreshadowed this end. “O toad, unfortunate toad! ". The octopuses, the sharks, the monsters which cross the _Songs of Maldoror_ could have haunted him in his last moments and justified his hatred of existence.

(in _Les Cahiers du Sud_, n° 266, June-July 1944)


In Memoriam Roger Gilbert-Lecomte

As long as he appeared alive, Roger Gilbert-The Count only had friends. At 25, he still looked like a child prodigy. We looked at him, we listened to him with the amazed astonishment felt by what is prematurely perfect. But as soon as he occupied his true place and stood decidedly on the verge of death, he remained alone. He was scary. Especially since he seemed to have chosen to remain silent, and kept the horror of what he was enduring to himself. His smile resembled the glass eye which only makes the emptiness of the orbit more hideous to the imagination. We turned away from him. Already he was no longer: he was beginning to be. We couldn't stand the presence of this absence. In recent times, he only kept 2 or 3 men in his wake whose strength was decreasing. I had given up a long time ago... Those who believed they could explain everything by its physical deterioration did not understand this. Roger Gilbert-Lecomte's responsibility for his own death is complete; but _other_. 
He was from the race of seers. The use of the eye makes men blind; what they see takes the place of what is. After a few others whose names it is better not to mention, Gilbert-Lecomte set about ruining reality, which for him was shrinking every day, like a skin of sorrow. This phenomenon did not impoverish him but made him suffer intolerably. It was because his body, greedily tortured by the drug, was thwarting the transformation of his mind. No doubt, if he had been able to renounce the poison that was devouring him, he would have taken another step towards the goal he had foreseen, or, to put it more accurately, towards this indescribable explanation, this forever inaccessible temple of the Absolute to which he knew moreover that death would bring him closer. Consider, however, the terrible destiny of those like him, of those who wanted to find out for themselves, who managed to approach the truth in the wild, without a compass, guided imperiously by this inner flair, this furious gift of vision for which religions cannot replace and which burns and eats away those who possess it as surely as radium. 
These are not words: Gilbert-Lecomte was _affected_. I was 15 when we met. O you, his brothers at this time, you Daumal, Meyrat, Vaillant, do you see again this face that Vaurore. of agony appears with its faded colors? His beauty was that of a god darkened by exile. He began in this martyrdom to which he had invited us, which with him we agreed to endure, but to the end of which he reached alone. He then looked at everything with the tender and cruel, modestly disenchanted look of the young lords of spleen. Approaching the outside world without anger, he did not emit those howls which characterize intellectual riots, and which he listened to me utter with the friendly commiseration of a man for a child. Because he was not a rebel but an objector. He knew, moreover, that the path he was embarking on would lead him to places that were much more hostile, and that it would have been unreasonable to maintain for long this hallucinatory struggle against a state of things to which he was already turning his back... He could not hate humanity, whose profound incoherence, whose almost total decadence resulted for him from the sacrilegious oblivion into which it had fallen of the metaphysical laws which lead to Knowledge.

* * *

I then felt for him the affection of a disciple for his master. Of this religious feeling which often went without words and which, when we were together, gave to the smallest things an inestimable value, it seems to me that at the moment I cannot speak. How can we describe this plenary union, this solemn advancement in a world that we created and which covered us with its poetry? The night especially was favorable to us: she wore our livery. For hours we walked, attentive to note the progress of the transfiguration of which we were the promoters and witnesses. We headed deeper into the town, which I see today, sunken in the rain, rendered opaque, dappled with lights, and deserted. We knew that from this adventurous journey we would bring back a large supply of sweet sadness which at the moment of parting we would share and take with us to then spread throughout the day... We belonged to this carefree generation, passed to despair like the deserter to the enemy, and who only wanted to commit to living wisely. We turned the word happiness back and forth in all directions, like one of those objects whose use an archaeologist vainly tries to guess. So strangely alive, stuck in a torturous dream, that we were nevertheless far from dementia! Setting out in our own search, we endeavored to bring to light an image of ourselves which could disaccustom us to the one we carried with us, and which was for us what the jailer is for the prisoner: an obstacle to his freedom. We tried, with painful obstinacy, with haggard seriousness, to separate ourselves from the world of appearances like the insect from its chrysalis, in order to access authenticity. Between what we felt we could be and what life claimed we were, the gap always grew. In order not to lose anything of what we had acquired and not to give in to the demands coming from everywhere, from ambition, from the desire to enjoy, we practiced contempt: of the entire reality, we had managed to make a museum of horrors. I know many of us saw this behavior as nothing more than a game, or an easy way to stand out. Their existence was not changed: ours resembled a march to torture. I will not dwell on the brilliant period of Gilbert-Lecomte's life, because it was only a stopover for him. Coming after surrealism, the literary movement, or more precisely the movement of thought of which the magazine _Le Grand Jeu_ was the organ, offered only very external similarities with that which had preceded it. If, as I have just written, we mistreated reality, we nonetheless made light of the surrealist attitude, an elegant way of not being, of elucidating everything, a worldly solution to the most essential of problems, and which never went beyond words. All things considered, it is fair to say that we were to the Surrealists what the German Romantics were to the French Romantics. For us it was about something other than maintaining more or less comfortable positions; or to eternally assume the role of denouncers. This game of massacre, this profession of fake executioners only tempted us poorly. Moreover, the pages of the _Grand Jeu_ would not have been enough to contain the message that Gilbert-Lecomte believed he was bringing; they only constituted for him a momentarily suitable place, only a point in the interior panorama which was his, from which to raise the ground conquered before moving forward again. He was acutely aware of this. At 16 he already foresaw his rise and, if I dare say so, his fall towards the summits. I want to emphasize this, which constituted my friend's tragedy, in which he got bogged down to the point of being bogged down. There came a time when his companions abandoned him; some to follow a different path which seemed to them to be truer; others simply out of weariness, out of an imperative need to retrace their steps. It's not my place to judge them. But let them please refrain from doubting what I am going to write now; for of him who until then had led them they knew nothing more from that day. With singular temerity, they now considered him dead. The being who continued to bear his name did not interest them. The Roger they had known only existed in their memory. And, in the long run, this turned out to be very true. As he advanced in this domain of solitude where the warning signs of his Passion were increasingly numerous, Gilbert-Lecomte changed until he only secondarily resembled the man he had been. But far from impoverishing him, frequent exposure to suffering in all its forms fully enriched him. His decline endowed him with new virtues. Those who knew him then and who were fascinated by his strength of soul, doubted whether he could ever have been this boy who had previously been described to them, capricious, quite naively in love with glory, and whose vanity sometimes contradicted his profound excellence. Nothing youthful anymore showed through in him. His humility, his tolerance, his humor which remained benevolent were overwhelming. He who had, in a way, resigned as a man, now provided striking proof of his humanity. We thus knew that he would reach the denouement without even stiffening, and that, relaxed, he would let himself slide into the arms of death. 
But this serenity was excruciating. The evil to which he succumbed and of which his death was only going to be the symbol, that the transposition onto the physical plane, was equivalent to a nameless torture, which we could not consider without fear. Gilbert-Lecomte's fidelity to the faith which had first inspired him and which was necessarily to crush him needed no expression. She was a fire that only consumed him. Harassed by the duty to fulfill, by the task that motivated him, he remained incapable of coping with it. Of this interior exploration so resolutely conducted, he would leave only hasty notes, only a brief testimony. Instead of having a barrier to the dramatic flowering of his thoughts, he suffered it, like the patient the different phases of his illness. Where others had escaped the grip of their devouring meditation by falling into madness, he remained entirely but uselessly lucid. It wasn't laziness that was holding him back; nor helplessness. The bitter tyranny of what he felt, obviously joined to this need which gnawed at his flesh and vitiated his blood, left him no respite. Sometimes, miraculously, he emerged from himself, and recorded his vision in a poem. These few cries, these verses in a frenzied accent give an account of his ordeal. He looked a little like those mystics whose contemplation abolishes them; but his only united him with himself: it identified him ever more closely with this night which hope and doubt inhabited in turn and which tirelessly but with diminishing energy, he persisted in wanting to break through. Brought together, his various writings will form a work. This will not have the universal character that he had dreamed of giving it. In this sense, its disappearance is comparable to the destruction of an extremely rare manuscript of which there is no copy. Entering the Broussais hospital on Christmas Day, Gilbert-Lecomte died there on December 31, at a quarter to 6 in the evening, overcome by tetanus, from which more than 15 years previously he had predicted that he would die. He was the first to detect the nature of his illness. Without showing astonishment or showing the slightest apprehension, he accepted this invitation which he had so often imagined, and which in fact now he knew by heart; at this meeting from which he was going to obtain his redemption. Those who, after having left him on the threshold of delirium, saw him for the last time before he was taken to Reims where he rests, were unanimously struck by his resemblance to Christ. I note this, which perhaps was not meant to be said, with particular emotion. (1).

<div class="toRight">Pierre MINET.</div>

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(1) I cannot do less to finish than mention the name of Mrs. Georges Firmat, who watched over the last years of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte with absolute dedication and disinterestedness. May she please find here the expression of the gratitude of the poet's friends.

(in _Les Cahiers du Sud_, n° 266, June-July 1944)

Jacques Rivière and the modernity of the 1920s

Jean Paulhan: Linguistic amputation and literary censorship

All research on Lautréamont has been in vain. On April 2, 1921, Félix Vallotton, author of the portrait of Lautréamont published in the _Livre des Masques_, wrote to us: “This portrait is a pure invention, made without any document, no one, including de Gourmont, having the slightest insight into the character. However I know that we searched. It is therefore an image of pure fantasy, but circumstances ended up giving it substance and it is generally considered plausible. » The shadow only grew as new “works” of Lautréamont were unearthed, only the Poems and a few letters, which only allowed, with great bad faith, to be put on the agenda. The image of pure fantasy ended up getting the better of the true image, the one that escaped the contingencies of time, mood, reading. All of Lautréamont's portraits, none of which are from nature, follow one another and resemble each other. The author of the latest, Mr. Philippe Soupault, has proven himself. We've known him for too long. He will put his name, more and more ignoble, on the front of all the books that we thought were closed to us forever.

Humanity is in the bag and everyone's complete works continue to appear. Those of Count de Lautréamont (but I see myself living, you see yourself living, they die, we are transparent as if Lautréamont were a thousand years old) these works appear for the sixth and last time ([1](#f1)). All studies, all comments, all notes past and future, by Philippe Soupault. “Come on music. » But what music! The end of the 19th century, the chancellors, the exotic, the bizarre, the bourgeois houses, Edgar Quinet, the quotations to cry, the Ecole Polytechnique, the imbecile nostalgia of women and the rest, Ducaise, Ducaire, Dutiers or Duquart, these "great butterflies that we still call today prostitutes", which is done in less or more than a year, the despair of the tenants, the small cups of coffee and the large cup, knowing where one is going, literary criticism, the fatal broth of genius, a Plutarch to write the Lives of Illustrious Editors, offers more attractive than requests, moving, the fat Madame Lacroix, morality which can make one think of that of Robespierre or of Saint-Just but not of one of the two, the unattended funerals which go at full speed and which arrive too late, the absence of a file at the police headquarters, all of that, everything this, all this so that we are cowards, cowards like the preface, so that we wear out our hearts on the steps, so that the door is closed, so that we rasp our tongues on the top of the walls, and so that the break-in stops there, all this surrounds this book, hides it, defiles it, trivializes it, extinguishes it under the petty passions of those who read it, under the betrayal of those who pretend to understand it, under the free detachment of those for whom it is not made.

Some amateur revolutionaries have no other desire than to use today everything that helps us live to do Father François' trick. We will abuse our love of Lautréamont and our hope in communism to reduce them to one and the same expression, so as to discredit them in our own eyes, to abandon ourselves to a sort of dead center from which we can no longer distinguish the absolute from the relative. For our enemies, everything would obviously be more convenient if there was only one bridge to cross from spirit to life. This is not the case. Whether or not Lautréamont was a revolutionary activist, whether or not he spoke to the crowds, we don't care. But, until further information is given, everything leads us to believe that he was desperately self-sufficient and that it was in vain that anyone would have wanted, as long as he lived, to brandish him on a platform. We would like to make it known that the man named Ducasse who, in the public meetings of 1869, took the floor to quote the epistles of Saint Paul and draw oratorical effects from the Gnouf-gnouf tic was not Isidore Ducasse, the one we claim to support against all odds. Our friend Robert Desnos, when he suggested that the author of the Chants de Maldoror and the orator cited by Vallès in L'Insurgé could be one and the same, was unaware that the second was identified by Charles Da Costa who had known him intimately, as well as Alphonse Humbert, Breuillé, Charles Longuet and Ménart ([2](#f2)). The Ducasse in question was called Félix Ducasse (Cf.: The Blanquists, by Charles Da Costa, Librairie Marcel Rivière). The Count of Lautréamont, whom political problems do not seem to have otherwise agitated, therefore had nothing in common with Félix Ducasse other than the very vulgar homonym which imposes on Mr. Soupault for an "overwhelming resemblance." »

We say that Mr. Soupault cheats, most apparently, most miserably in the world, in the only part where he perhaps should not cheat. He cheats, not to cheat, but to gain what, in exchange for his worst renunciation, the editions of “Sans Pareil” grant him. How much ?

However, there was once a question of refusing the poor man's share and of exaggerating silence, the only dignity that the Count of Lautréamont deserved. Suffice it to say that it was an attitude in the world which highly defied any attempt at popularization, any interested classification, any desire for opportunism, which was nothing but eternal. We oppose, we continue to oppose, Lautréamont entering history, being assigned a place between Un Tel and Un Tel ([3](#f3)). On earth, Mr. Soupault, if even Lautréamont's place were at the corner of earth, fire, air and water, where could yours be, if not between wine and the water which cuts it?

But, as the place of Lautréamont is elsewhere, you are no longer there.

Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Eluard

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&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;1 - Let's not talk about the (illustrated!) edition that the art bookbinder Blanchetière is preparing. The copy: 1,200 francs. At this price, we are heartbreaking. [↩](#a1) 
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;2 - All five were sentenced to fifteen days in prison following a demonstration against the Emperor of Austria during his visit to Paris in 1867. [↩](#a2) 
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;3 - For example, between Baudelaire and Rimbaud. (Strip from the “Complete Works” volume.) [↩](#a3)

Contextual texts and works

Surréalisme

Le Grand Jeu

NRF

Censure