Departures of note

Jean-Pierre Duprey, born in Rouen in 1930, was a poet and sculptor whose work and life embodied the poète maudit archetype. In 1948, André Breton, founder of Surrealism, was struck by the darkness and imagery in Duprey's early poetry and invited him to Paris. Duprey's verse, as seen in his final collection The End and the Means (1970), posed questions without answers, yet his biographers noted he found a way 'beyond' conventional thought. His most notorious act came when he urinated on the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe, an act for which he was arrested, beaten in jail, and later committed to a mental hospital.

Between 1951 and 1958, Duprey stopped writing entirely, devoting himself to sculpture. He returned to poetry in 1959 to complete his last book, and upon finishing it, he asked his wife to send the manuscript to Breton. When she returned from the post office, she found him dead; he had hanged himself in his studio. Three days before his death, he had calmly told a friend, 'I am allergic to this planet.' His posthumously published works include Derrière son double (1950), La Forêt sacrilège (1964), and Un bruit de baiser ferme le monde (2001), cementing his legacy as a singular, tormented voice in French letters.