from Nadja by Andre Breton

Once again, now, I see Robert Desnos at the period those of us who knew him call the "Nap Period." He "dozes" but he writes, he talks. It is evening, in my studio over the Cabaret du Ciel. Outside, someone is shouting: "Come one, come all, come to the Chat Noir!" And Desnos continues seeing what I do not see, what I see only after he shows it to me. He borrows the personality of the most singular man alive as well as the most elusive, the most deceptive, the author of Le Cimetiere des Uniformes et Livrees, Marcel Duchamp. Desnos has never seen him in real life. What in Duchamp seemed most inimitable through some mysterious "play on words" (RRose Selavy) can be found in Desnos in all its purity and suddenly assumes an extraodrinary resonance. Those who have not seen his pencil set on paper - without the slightest hesitation and with an astonishing speed - those amazing poetic equations, and have not ascertained, as I have, that they could not have been prepared a long time before, even if they are capable of appreciating their technical perfection and of judging their wonderful loftiness, cannot conceive of everything involved in their creation at the time, of the absolutely oracular value they assumed. Someone who was present at those innumerable sessions would have to take the trouble to recount them dispassionately, to describe them precisely, to situate them in their true atmosphere. A discussion of this point is actually called for. Of all the subsequent appointments Desnos, his eyes closed, made for me with himself, with someone else, or with myself, there is not one I feel, even now, I have the heart to miss, not one, at the most unlikely place and time, where I am not sure of finding whomever he has told me about.