« Aube adieu ! Je sors du bois hanté ; j'affronte les / routes, croix torrides »

Remarkable autograph poem by a young André Breton, signed, titled "Poème" and dedicated to Léon-Paul Fargue, 21 lines in black ink on laid paper, dated by the author February 19, 1916, and probably composed ten days earlier. Our manuscript was written between March 1917 and early 1918.
Presented in a chemise and slipcase covered with abstract-patterned paper boards, the chemise spine in olive-green morocco, endpapers and pastedowns in cream suede, with a flexible plexiglass sheet protecting the poem; the slipcase edged with olive-green morocco, bearing on its lower front cover an olive paper label inscribed "poème autographe"; the whole signed by Thomas Boichot.
A key poem from Breton’s pre-Dadaist period, it belongs to a coherent group of seven autograph poems (identified as coll. X. in the Œuvres complètes d'André Breton, vol. I, La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1988, p. 1071). These poems, in the author’s youthful hand, are neatly penned in black ink on watermarked laid paper. The set was addressed to his circle of friends and fellow writers, including Valéry, Apollinaire, Théodore Fraenkel, and his comrade André Paris. It was later published in his first collection, Mont de piété, issued in June 1919 by Au sans Pareil, the publishing house newly founded by his friend René Hilsum.
The precise dating of this group of autograph poems is established by the composition of the last poem in the series ("André Derain"), completed on March 24, 1917, providing an absolute terminus post quem. Moreover, the present manuscript is an earlier version of the poem “Age,” dedicated to Léon-Paul Fargue. Dated by the author February 19, 1916 – his twentieth birthday – and composed ten days earlier according to his correspondence, it was not retitled and revised until its publication in July 1918 in Les Trois Roses. Most likely preceding this publication, the seven autograph poems were probably written during 1917 or early 1918, while Breton was completing his medical internship at the Val-de-Grâce hospital and meeting Louis Aragon.
The poems that would later form Mont de piété represent a rare and precious testimony to Breton’s early influences, on the threshold of his adherence to the Dada movement and his discovery of automatic writing. Brief and sometimes cryptic, they reveal Symbolist inflections inherited from Mallarmé, whom Breton rediscovered at poetic matinées at the Théâtre Antoine and the Vieux-Colombier with his school friend Théodore Fraenkel. During the first months of the war, Breton also devoted himself to Rimbaud, immersing himself in Les Illuminations, the only book he carried away amid the confusion following the declaration of war. From his Rimbaldian readings were born the poems “Décembre,” “Age,” and “André Derain,” while he borrowed Apollinaire’s muse Marie Laurencin, to whom he dedicated “L’an suave.” The poetic legacy of Valéry, with whom he began corresponding in 1914, was also decisive. Valéry played a crucial role in shaping the poems of Mont de piété, through his attentive guidance and advice to the young poet. Admiring his disciple’s audacity, to whom he sent each poem, Valéry praised “Facon” (1916) in these terms: “Thème, langage, visée, métrique, tout est neuf, mode future, façon” (Letter from June 1916, Œuvres complètes d'André Breton, vol. I, La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1988, p. 1072).
These essential landmarks of Breton’s youth were composed between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three. Caught in Lorient at the outbreak of war, he became a military nurse, serving in several hospitals and on the front during the Meuse offensive. In Nantes, he met Jacques Vaché, who inspired a collective writing project and the illustration of the future collection Mont de Piété, ultimately carried out by André Derain. His friendship with this “dandy revolted against art and war,” who shared his admiration for Jarry, and his encounters with the patients of the neuro-psychiatric center in Saint-Dizier marked a decisive step toward surrealism. Stationed at Val-de-Grâce from 1917, Breton found in Paris the literary effervescence essential to his poetic quest, reciting Rimbaud with Aragon. Through Apollinaire, he befriended Soupault, the future co-author of Les Champs magnétiques, and Reverdy, founder of the review Nord-Sud, which would publish poems from Mont de piété. The seven poems were later published in avant-garde literary journals (Les Trois Roses, Solstices, Nord-Sud) between 1917 and early 1919.
Four of the seven poems were dedicated to Breton’s mentors and friends: Léon-Paul Fargue, and above all Apollinaire, to whom Breton had devoted a study in L’Eventail. He also paid tribute to Marie Laurencin and André Derain, creators of “plastic works still entirely new, beset by near-unanimous disapproval and intolerance,” cherished by Breton throughout his life (XXe siècle, no. 3, June 1952).

Through his dedications, Breton multiplies cross-references, dedicating to one a poem inspired by another, as in this poem dedicated to Léon-Paul Fargue, echoing Rimbaud’s “Aube” (Les Illuminations, 1895). This poem was first published after the writing of the present manuscript in the journal Les Trois Roses, no. 2, July 1918, where it took the new title “Age,” having been originally titled “Poème.” Our autograph manuscript is an earlier draft, as sent by Breton to Valéry and Apollinaire in February 1916. It includes, in the fourth stanza, an additional line later omitted from the final publication: “O bras si pleins qui m'ont déçu de flexions troubles, anses lilas que rudoyait le nœud tors!”
The influence of Rimbaud is striking here – a homage to the master easily discernible in the lines “Aube adieu ! Je sors du bois hanté ; j'affronte les / routes, croix torrides” (v. 1–2), recalling the end of Rimbaud’s poem: “L’aube et l’enfant tombèrent au bas du bois. Au réveil il était midi.” Upon receiving the poem, Valéry forgave the young Breton his Rimbaldian fever: “Je vois maintenant que l'illumination vous gagne. La noble maladie suit son cours. Il faut l'avoir eue, guérir, et en garder certaines traces.”

A rare youthful manuscript, a Rimbaldian reverence by André Breton at that “intellectual point of fusion [...] when Rimbaud and Mallarmé, irreconcilable, meet in one poet” (Paul Valéry, letter of January 1916).