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Nadja

Nadja Folder

Manuscript

Author

Author Nadja
Letter to André Breton

Description

Folder containing Nadja’s letters and telegrams to Breton dated from 9 October 1926 to 4 March 1927.

Nadja: a woman, a book... and a voluminous and well-preserved folder containing fascinating documents relating to an unusual story. Letters and drawings, some of which were included in the book, introduce us to the heart of what, before becoming a literary myth, was above all a real life story. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

In early October 1926, André Breton got to know a young woman in the street whose ‘fragility, imperceptible smile and curiously unfinished makeup’ attracted his attention. She was Léona-Camille-Ghislaine D., known as Nadja.

‘They saw each other almost daily from 4 to 13 October 1926, meeting in cafés, wandering around Paris according to Nadja's mood or inspiration, until the day following the night they spent together in a hotel in Saint-Germain-en-Laye… Although he may have continued to see Nadja, he henceforth kept a distance, as the content and frequency of her letters show: for the period from 4 to 13 October there was only one pneumatic, on the 9th, designed to establish a meeting place; between 22 October 1926 and the middle of February 1927, there were twenty-seven letters or pneumatics. It was also during these days that Nadja began to draw.

‘We experience a certain emotion in finding in these pages all the things that explain the fascination and examination Breton set out in his narrative; some of Nadja's remarks recounted in the book appear in the exact form in which they are to be found in her letters. But they show even more clearly than the text what Breton meant to the young woman and how their relationship evolved, while at the same time revealing Nadja's prescience of her own fate, giving it a poignant resonance… From the time she meets Breton, Léona/Nadja is seized by a major certainty: that this man placed in her path by chance is different from anyone else she has known; he has something great to accomplish and is invested with a high and imprecise mission [...]. But Nadja isn’t blinded by this distraught adoration and hunger for an omnipotent presence: she is aware, even if she sometimes hopes against hope, that her relationship with Breton is marked by the seal of the impossible…

‘One glimmer of hope nevertheless remains: that her own life should at least serve the poet in the mission with which she sees him as having been entrusted: “You will use me and I will do my best to help you in something good.” But even if she insists on committing herself to this “fatal destiny” with “enchantment”, she doesn’t do so without revolt. Noting Breton's distance from her, having complained on 1 December that she had been forgotten, on the 15th deploring the fact that she had not seen him for twelve days and then, at the end of January, that she had only met him twice during the whole month, she violently rebelled against fate and against Breton himself, whom she then saw as a ‘wild beast’ whose prey she was rather than as the solar source of possible happiness; in her distress she goes as far as to reproach him for his interest in her and in despair cries out: “I feel I will be lost if you abandon me”, as she writes on 30 January...

‘A few weeks after this final message, Léona/Nadja’s reason definitively breaks down... Nadja will be confined in a psychiatric hospital until her death on 15 January 1941.
(Excerpts from Marguerite Bonnet’s remarkable notes in the Œuvres complètes, volume I, Nadja, pages 1510-13) André Breton wrote Nadja in 1927 at the Ango manor near Varengeville. [catalogue of the sale, 2003]

*This entry was translated from the French by Michael Richardson.