André Breton constantly reaffirmed his ambition to live in a glass house, open to all gazes, not out of a more or less conscious desire for exhibitionism, but, more naturally, because it is the only and unique mode of relationship that he conceives, both with his contemporaries and with his future readers: "For me, I will continue to inhabit my glass house, where one can see at any hour who comes to visit me, where everything suspended from ceilings and walls holds as if by enchantment, where I rest at night on a glass bed with glass sheets, where who I am will appear to me sooner or later engraved in diamond" This passage ends, in Nadja, the prelude to what will become the narrative, or more precisely the journal of an encounter with the surrealist woman par excellence, and, one can say, the moving account of a failure, so little compatibility was there between the wandering young woman and the one she magnified. It is often that, for Breton, "the boat of love has broken against the running water", to take up a verse by Mayakovsky, which he will give as title to the obituary article evoking the suicide of the Russian poet. In other words, the desire for transparency has collided with the obstacle of the real. End of the first act.

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"Transparency and obstacle", in The Glass House, André Breton initiator discoverer, Les Éditions de l'amateur/Musée de Cahors, p. 11-18. Catalog of the André Breton the glass house exhibition, Cahors, from September 20, 2014 to February 1, 2015.