Invited to a wedding party of a cousin-in-the-Breton-fashion in a salon of the Hôtel Lutetia in Paris, I met Jean Sarment (1897-1976), the actor, playwright whose Le pêcheur d'ombres I had read. I knew he was born in Nantes and had been a classmate of Jacques Vaché. So I was very curious to know what he thought about it, and especially what he knew about it. The conversation was very friendly, interspersed with long silences. Yes, he had known Vaché well, but he wasn't the most important of the group. Besides, he had written little, and Breton had made him a myth. He hadn't committed suicide, died from an overdose.
At that time, Jean Sarment hadn't written his novelistic autobiography entitled Cavalcadour (1977), where he deals with his school friendships, clearly highlighted! And when Michel Carassou asked me to preface his work devoted to the Nantes group, I did so willingly, while proposing that it constitute the first volume of the "Bibliothèque Mélusine" that I intended to publish with two associated publishers for the occasion, L'Age d'Homme and J.-M. Place, whom I brought to meet. Unfortunately for me, they couldn't get along, the first treating the other as a "maker", so much so that the volume was the only one to constitute this "Bibliothèque Mélusine" at Place, while a collection of the same name – and of the same requirement – evolved at the Lausanne-Paris publisher.

Michel Carassou, Jacques Vaché and the Nantes Group, Preface by Henri Béhar, ed. J.-M. Place, Paris, 1986, 200 p.

Michel Carassou's objective is to shed light on the Nantes high school group from which Jacques Vaché's personality would emerge and, through Breton, surrealism would be born. In Nantes, Eugène Hublet, Pierre Bissérié, Jean Sarment and Jacques Vaché share the same classes, the same freedom (they are all four day students) and the same love for literature and the arts. In 1913 the group published the single issue of the handwritten journal En route mauvaise troupe, then four issues of the Wild Duck. These publications show the influence of the Symbolists on the youth of the time and give an interesting definition of anarchy: "to be an anarchist is to have become aware of one's own value, it is to have risen above the stupid and cowardly crowd and to feel capable of living without the mercantile laws established by them." This work reproduces, with an analysis by Michel Carassou, the main publications of the Nantes group. It is with curiosity that we discover En route mauvaise troupe, the Wild Duck, What the Sârs Said.

Download the preface

Cf.: Jean Sarment and the Nantes Group
This preface is reproduced in HB: History of Literary Facts, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2022, pp. 15-26.