Character Catalog

A major collection that reveals Éluard as a great poet of love and suffering. It contains poems of exceptional musicality, blending surrealist imagery with pure lyricism.

A surrealist collection exploring the inseparable bond between love and poetic creation. It opens with the famous line 'The earth is blue like an orange', which became an emblem of surrealist language.

A collection published clandestinely during the Occupation, whose poem 'Liberty' became the symbol of the French Resistance. Dropped by the RAF, it was read throughout occupied Europe.

A collection of resistance poems written during the Occupation and published at the Liberation. It bears witness to Éluard's commitment against Nazism and for human dignity.

An artist's book pairing Éluard's poems with photographs of Nusch taken by Man Ray. This collaboration illustrates the surrealist fusion of poetry, photography, and desire.

A collection illustrated by Pablo Picasso, bearing witness to the deep friendship between the two artists. It blends love poems with reflections on artistic creation.

A collection written after the sudden death of Nusch in 1946, a true cry of pain and grief. It stands as one of the most poignant testimonies to love and loss in French poetry.

On my school notebooks / On my desk and the trees / On the sand on the snow / I write your name / [...] / And by the power of a word / I begin my life again / I was born to know you / To name you / Liberty.

The earth is blue like an orange / Never a mistake words do not lie / They no longer give you songs to sing / Now it is the turn of kisses to understand each other.

I told you so for the clouds / I told you so for the tree of the sea / For each wave for the birds in the leaves / For the pebbles of sound.

You are the woman of my life and you remained so even when you left me. The pain you caused me only served to feed the verses I write, and for that I cannot hold it against you.

Paris is cold Paris is hungry / Paris no longer eats chestnuts in the street / Paris has put on old women's old clothes / Paris sleeps standing up without air in the metro.

Birthplace of Paul Éluard, born in 1895 in this working-class town in the northern suburbs of Paris. His working-class origins influenced his social sensibility and later political commitment.

The neighbourhood where Éluard lived and frequented literary and artistic cafés (La Rotonde, Le Dôme), at the heart of the Surrealist ferment of the 1920s–1930s. It was here that he mixed with Breton, Picasso, Ernst and Man Ray.

Mountain resort where the young Éluard stayed in a sanatorium between 1912 and 1914 to treat his tuberculosis. It was there that he met Gala, his first muse and future wife.

Town in the Paris suburbs where Éluard lived with Max Ernst and Gala in a complex Surrealist and romantic ménage in the early 1920s, an experience that left a profound mark on his life.

The town where Paul Éluard died on 18 November 1952 of a heart attack. He is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Éluard wrote his verses in notebooks he constantly carried with him. Handwritten composition was for him a fundamental stage of poetic work, the act of writing being an integral part of the creative process.

During the Occupation, Éluard's poems circulated as mimeographed or clandestinely printed leaflets. 'Liberté' was distributed throughout France and dropped by the Allies, becoming a symbol of cultural resistance.

A close friend of Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, Éluard lived surrounded by surrealist artworks. He regularly collaborated with painters, writing poems in response to their canvases.

Published from 1924 to 1929, this journal was the main organ of the Surrealist movement to which Éluard regularly contributed. It embodied the Surrealists' ambition to transform life through art and poetry.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Éluard used a typewriter to produce clean copies of his manuscripts before publication. This tool symbolises the transition between intimate creation and the public dissemination of his work.

Éluard carefully preserved photographs of his second wife Nusch, who posed both for Surrealist artists and for intimate portraits. These images fed his poetic imagination until the young woman's death in 1946.