Jacques Vache
Jacques Vaché (7 September 1895 – 6 January 1919) was a friend of André Breton, the founder of surrealism. Vaché was one of the chief inspirations behind the Surrealist movement.
In 1914 he went in Brest to fight in WWI and to work as a translator; in 1915 was wounded and later in a Nantes' hospital he became friend with the physician André Breton. Since this moment Vaché became one the main inspirations for Surrealism and for Breton's anthology of Black Humour.
Jacques Vaché his also remembered when on 24 June 1917 dressed as a british soldier he jumped on the seats of Conservatoire Maubel just after the first act of Les Mamelles de Tirésias by Guillaume Apollinaire treating the public with a gun.
He died in a hotel room in Nantes on 6 January 1919 from an overdose of opium. Alongside him lay the naked body of another French soldier. He was known for his indifference to French contemporary culture, for wearing a monocle and for being a bohemian dandy with a turbolent life. He didn't left any completed work of literature beyond his letters from the warfront published in 1919 and written to Breton, Louis Aragon, Fraenkel and others, which acquired a cult status among surrealists.
“Well then – I see two ways of letting things take their course – Create one’s own sensations with the help of a flamboyant collision of rare words – not often, mind you – or else neatly draw the angles, the squares, the entire geometry of feelings – those of the moment, naturally.”
“You know the horrible life of the alarm clock – it’s a monster that has always appalled me because of the number of things its eyes project, and the way that good fellow stares at me when I enter a room.”
“Black Humor (Umor): a sensation --of the theatrical (and joyless) pointlessness of everything.”