"Ecris tout ce qui te passe par la fenêtre"

| "Write down everything that passes by your window" said Lise |

Autograph preparatory manuscript by André Breton for the preface to the sale catalogue of the Lise Deharme collection. One half-page handwritten in black ink, and one half-page typescript with manuscript corrections, each on the verso of a sheet with letterhead "A l'étoile scellée / Rue du Pré-Aux-Clercs - Paris VIIe".
Precious working manuscript by André Breton, extensively crossed out with numerous variants.
The father of Surrealism here signs the preface to the sale of Surrealist books and modern paintings of a major protagonist of the movement: the novelist Lise Deharme. The sale took place at the Hôtel Drouot on March 6, 1953, under the hammer of Maurice Rheims. Accompanying the manuscript is the typescript of the text, with Breton's very last corrections in black ink.

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Lise Deharme and Breton had met in 1924, the year of publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism. She fascinated Breton who made her a muse of the movement and a true symbol of the Surrealist revolution. Deharme was immortalized in Nadja and maintained a complex and symbiotic relationship with the writer throughout her life.
Breton here pays homage to her through this preface, blackened with corrections and reworked many times: through this presentation "he signs a manner of acknowledgment of debt toward the one who had offered him Nadja's glove" (Association André Breton).

" What will be dispersed here, let it be said that for some it is a bit of time's treasure. Of the manna from which we draw what we need to make ourselves this shell_ the furnishing in the very broad sense where it conditions as much the choice of books as of [ornaments] plants or birds. So rare are those who, like Lise Deharme, have known how to extract what is electively made for them from both the interior [exterior] and the exterior [interior]. "To the country that resembles you", is it not of this that Baudelaire spoke?
And one finds again his melancholy in seeing, in the wind, fly like seeds [fly in the wind like a thistle] these things that so much passionate discernment had gathered as if, around the one who surrounded herself with them, they had come obeying a law of pure attraction.
The poetic taste of an epoch in what it has of specific, has sparkled there as nowhere else. That in particular it may be permitted me to say that [in its sovereign caprice, and what it exalted of the present and retained of the past] Surrealism, through several of us, has keenly undergone the ascendancy of this sovereign caprice.
"Write down everything that passes by your window" said [says] Lise and [no longer thinks today of keeping anything for herself, only the] here she adds: keep nothing but what you hold from the source's murmur of that year and from the perfume of the Moss Pot.
But everything from which she separates thanks to her will remain so charged with spirit that nothing will be able to extinguish it in its gravitation toward other destinies"