ARTAUD Antonin. - Lot 34

ARTAUD Antonin. AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED to Madame CHAMPIGNY. Rodez, October 16, 1943. 4 pages in-4 in ink. Absolutely delirious letter from Artaud about his mystical faith and psychotic disorders related to sexual relations. It is addressed to a mysterious Madame Champigny, a fantasized character. What I think of you Champigny is that in reality you are this angel I'm talking about, who is your soul that has been living in paradise for centuries now, and who wanted to lean on your suffering body a little longer, because your suffering is all you wanted to take from the earth to help God overcome human sin. There are some of us in this Champigny world who are nothing more than returnees. I myself have already died several times since 1937, and I know that you Champigny will believe it... which is to say that if I'm still in Antonin Artaud's body, I've suffered and died enough times to have been able to recognize myself as another who comes from elsewhere. Just like each and every one of you Champigny, for you are your souls, not your bodies. If Antonin Artaud fished, he never stopped hating and despising himself to the very extent that he saw himself as a fisherman, because what he was looking for, as I now know, was God, and God ended up answering him, because all it takes to see Him is to have known how to suffer. Flesh and sexuality are all that block our view of God, and this world will not end, nor will it find peace and happiness, until it has returned to its state of innocence, until man wants to be fully reintegrated into his virginal conception as he was before the fall of Adam. For God to cease to be martyred in heaven, the totality of man must have rejected sexuality... Abel was made like an angel and yet he had a body of flesh like Cain but without sex, whereas Cain was made by the sewer means of sexual parturition... you cannot address God in this way without once again renouncing Satan and his pumps and works, i.e. the flesh... I remind you now that I was illegally interned and that various friends such as Louis Jouvet, Jean Giraudoux...who had connections with the Second Bureau, provoked an investigation. After two years of internment, this investigation resulted in a dismissal and my release was decided. But a group of insiders led by Guillot de Givry, who had their center at 5 rue Victor Hugo in Paris on the second floor, and who had always pursued me with their enmity, paid the chief physician at Ville Evrard, where I was at the time, to write a biased medical report against me, and this report prevented my release... you have no doubt now that I have always loved you deeply, and much more than many talented artists.