" Et ce n'est pas un hasard si En attendant Godot, la pièce étonnante de Samuel Beckett, est une entrée de clowns qui dure deux heures, ne traite de rien en particulier, pose tous les problèmes, arrache le rire au moment où l'on devrait s'épouvanter "

Manuscript, partly unpublished, of an article on cabaret, nine pages plus two additional pages written in purple ink on perforated squared paper sheets. Numerous deletions and corrections as well as several additions. The sheets are numbered in the upper right margin from 1 to 9 then 12 and 13.
The first nine sheets of this text, which was never published during Boris Vian's lifetime, were transcribed in Les Vies posthumes de Boris Vian by Michel Fauré (1975). The text was erroneously dated 1948 by Fauré: the mention of Samuel Beckett's En attendant Godot, whose premiere took place in 1953, makes this dating impossible.
An interesting text evoking cabarets and the "troglodytes", a fine echo to the famous Manuel de Saint-Germain-des-Prés (1951): "Let us give back to Saint-Germain-des-Prés what rightfully belongs to it: besides a certain tonnage provided to journalists short of copy, this much-decried district - by those who precisely only knew it in its journalistic aspect - is at the origin of the profound transformation of cabaret. Yes, there was indeed a reason why intelligent people like Sartre, Prévert, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, etc., in short all those who today count in literature or the arts, followed with such attention the great movement of the cellars, despite the turbulence of the troglodytes and the incongruity of the photographer monkeys, despite the muddled activity of a generation of illiterate and boorish journalists, despite the vacant curiosity of the gawker and the bitter resentment of the chamber pot emptiers of rue Dauphine."
After briefly evoking jazz, a subject on which he is usually dithyrambic, Boris Vian devotes the greater part of his text to theater: "Jazz, on one side, carved out with great trumpet blows a place in the shade on the engine room side; that is its true environment: a smoky cellar, a back room, a dark laboratory where the faithful gather. [...] The musicians finally relaxed. But for their part the actors did not remain inactive." Visionary, Vian senses "in the air a scent of renewal" understanding the importance that cabaret theater would assume in the years to come. Two sheets (not transcribed in Fauré's work) evoke the theatrical avant-garde of the early 1950s: "And it is no accident if En attendant Godot, Samuel Beckett's astonishing play, is a clown entrance that lasts two hours, deals with nothing in particular, poses all problems, wrests laughter at the moment when one should be terrified [...] And it is no accident if the principal interpreter of Beckett's work, this pillar of avant-garde theater, is a cabaret veteran."