With Nadja at Moreau

One hundred years ago, on October 4, 1926, André Breton ran into a young woman on the sidewalk of Rue Lafayette. She told him her name was Nadja. They saw each other almost daily until mid-October, then the poet gradually drifted away. But on October 16, André Breton wrote in his notebook: “Gustave Moreau Museum. 3 p.m. Tyrtée interests him most of all. Altercation with the guards. Anger.”

In 1952, André Breton wrote of the Gustave Moreau Museum: “Discovering the Gustave Moreau Museum when I was sixteen shaped my way of loving forever. Beauty, love—that’s where I had my revelation through a few faces, a few poses of women.”

Nadja is an “apparition”—Breton refers to this in a letter to his wife written during the summer of 1927, as he recounts Nadja, a poem of the same name by Mallarmé. At the same time, Robert Desnos was writing the “Journal d’une apparition,” chronicling the appearances of a woman at night between January 1926 and January 1927.

Nadja is an enigma to be deciphered—and seduced. She is bewitching, fascinating, regal, and dangerous… Poor and lost. She is both real and unreal, just like Gustave Moreau’s women, such as Pasiphaë: “Pale and tall figures, terrible, solitary, dark, and desolate, fatal lovers, mysterious, condemned to titanic shame—what will become of you, what fates will be yours, where can your formidable loves hide?”

The evocation of Nadja within Gustave Moreau’s studios takes the form of a staged reading, performed by actors after dark, in front of certain paintings illuminated as if by a dim lamp.
 The text consists of a montage that includes, in front of each painting, a few sentences by Gustave Moreau, an excerpt from André Breton’s narrative, and letters that Nadja wrote to him. Some of the “slipping facts” that Breton lists at the beginning of his book are also referenced.

What is woven between bodies, between these bodies and a city, between life and dreams, between reason and madness, between madness and words, between words and paintings?  From this dance on the edge of reason, from this wandering at the gates of chimeras—Nadja is like a fairy, takes the form of a siren, sees herself as Melusine—from this blind man’s journey that leads them straight into a dream world, a hallucinatory world, right up to the inevitable fall—Breton’s narrative is punctuated by flashes, reminiscences, and echoes.