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[I am hostile to any enterprise...]
Letter dated Paris, 26 September 1965
Author
Author André Breton
Letter to J. Fontbonne
Description
Handwritten letter from André Breton dated 26 September 1965 responding to a teacher at the Lycée Chaptal.
There is no question of his being caught again by the institution! When a teacher at the Lycée Chaptal, on the letterhead of the general monitor (an acte manqué?) asks the student André Breton to remember those already distant years when he was a ‘mediocre student’ Breton responds with a categorical refusal. In September 1965, hardly wanted to remember those high school years, as he firmly explains, in a letter containing nothing anecdotal but is one of the most important documents about his early youth, a time of confinement and that the only things of interest he then experienced internal. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]
Handwritten and signed letter, dated 26 September 1965.
1 1/2 page in-4, an inspired handwritten letter dated and signed in ink by André Breton on L’Écart absolu letterhead in response to J. Fontbonne, a teacher at the Lycée Chaptal, who asked Breton about his schooling and his first verses published in the journal Vers l'idéal founded by Hilsum, his fellow student at the Lycée Chaptal. [sale catalogue, 2003]
*This entry was translated from the French by Michael Richardson
Transcription
‘I am hostile to any attempt to reduce me to the ‘pupil’ I may have been. I recognise myself only slightly in that rather distraught and certainly harassed child (due to the coercive apparatus implemented jointly by the parents and the teaching staff) and then only at an emotional level where my reactions then were necessarily kept strictly to myself. I can therefore hardly see what one could find of value in my school ‘copies’ or in the way in which I was able to face this or that competition without taste.
‘Passing the day before yesterday in front of the Chaptal building - leaving behind the bird's eye view of the tangle of its rails, which Mallarmé confided that not one day had they spared him the temptation to throw himself from the bridge onto the tracks - I noticed with some surprise that the cleaning work had not taken away any of its opacity for me.’
One recollection of this letter:
One of M. Fontbonne’s students remembered that he read Breton's letter to the class on receiving it in 1965.
Souvenir de cette lettre
Le souvenir d'un élève de M. Fontbonne qui, lorsqu'il reçut la lettre de Breton, la lut à ses élèves, en 1965.
| Creation date | 26/09/1965 |
| Destination address | |
| Bibliographical material | 1 page 1/2 in-4°
|
| Languages | French |
| Place of origin | |
| Number of pages | 2 |
| Reference | 1406000 |
| Breton Auction, 2003 | Lot 2632 |
| Keywords | Correspondence, Letter, Poetry |
| Categories | Correspondence, Letters from André Breton |
| Permanent link | https://cms.andrebreton.fr/en/work/56600101000224 |
