Lettres de guerre

A liaison officer between the French and British armies, Jacques Vaché was wounded in September 1915 and hospitalized at Saint-Dizier, where he befriended two young interns, André Breton and Théodore Fraenkel.

Les Lettres de guerre are dedicated to Fraenkel, with a preface by Breton. They constitute Vaché’s near-complete body of work, assembled after he had barely had time to attend the premiere of Les Mamelles de Tirésias before his death by opium overdose on 7 January 1919, in a room at the Hôtel de France, place Graslin, in Nantes.

All commentators point to Vaché’s “supreme detachment,” his ability to observe the world with a manifest objectivity that gives his writing a natural elegance no deliberate craft could achieve. These superb letters, at once grave and light, full of humor, were written between 1916 and November 1918, the last dated 26 November, barely a month before his death. Breton, who edited this volume — the third title in the “Littérature” series published by Au Sans Pareil — later confided that Vaché had helped “divert his life from its course.”

Of the man who had introduced him to the work of Jarry, Breton also wrote: “The time I spent with him in Nantes in 1916 seems to me enchanted. […] Without him I might have been a poet; he thwarted in me that conspiracy of obscure forces which leads one to believe oneself something as absurd as a vocation.” (Letter to Jacques Doucet, 20 November 1920).

A precious deluxe copy, in perfect condition, uncut.

From the library of Pierre Bergé (sale IV, no. 931).