Fortunes
Printed review copy (no deluxe-paper copies).
Presentation copy inscribed to Georges Poupet [one of the literary directors at Plon]:
“A Georges Poupet, ces fortunes qui je l'espère seront bonnes… Son ami, Desnos.”
A collected edition containing numerous previously published poems, notably “The Night of Loveless Nights.”
Paris, 1942. Having returned to his apartment on the rue Mazarine after a long captivity, Robert Desnos took up his manuscripts again, correcting and cutting. This long process of revision produced the present collection of poems. “What will I do in the future?” he wrote in the afterword, “if all plans were not measured by the length of a life, I would like to resume mathematical and physical studies in order to make ‘Poetics’ a chapter of mathematics.” Two years later, Desnos was arrested, interned at Compiègne and then sent to Germany. During the German collapse he was transferred to Czechoslovakia, where he died on 8 June 1945. This was his second book published by Gallimard, after Corps et Biens.