Photographie dédicacée
“À Max-Pol Fouchet, le compagnon d’Alger, le sourcier de Fontaine. René Char, 1945.”
Having chosen to publish nothing during the war and to fight instead, Char gave Max-Pol Fouchet, once peace had returned that year, notes written in 1943–1944 which, he explained, “mark the resistance of a humanism conscious of its duties, discreet about its virtues, wishing to leave the inaccessible field free for the fantasy of its suns, and determined to pay the price for that (…). They were written in tension, anger, fear, emulation, disgust, cunning, furtive meditation, the illusion of the future, friendship, love.”
These notes would become the future Feuillets d’Hypnos, the first extracts of which Max-Pol Fouchet published in his review Fontaine in October 1945 (no. 45, pp. 633–644): fragments 213, 214, 218, 291, 221 and 222, each then bearing an independent title (“Bora,” “Le vitrail de Valensole,” “La murmurée,” “La révélée,” “La marche” and “La carte du soir”). Gallimard published the complete collection in the “Espoir” series, directed by Albert Camus, in April 1946.
A moving and beautiful photograph given to the “sourcier de Fontaine,” with whom Char would go on to publish Premières alluvions in 1946 and, in 1947, Le Poème pulvérisé.