Desnos Robert – Chantefables and Chantefleurs: “An ant of eighteen meters, with a hat on the head It does not exist It does not exist.” Who does not know this ritornello? And how many of these little poems in La Prévert, with their musicality and play of softly delirious words, of which we propose here an illustrated edition, have they not enchanted the memories of our childhood? Is it to amuse Youki, his friend, that Robert Desnos, who had always dreamed of writing for the youth, embarked on this adventure? Or, on the contrary, did these poems carry messages to the key to the resistance where the SS were snails (SS Cargo) and the resistance of the Lamas who had to “listen to the echoes and flee the werewolf”?

In 1944 he wrote to his publisher, Grund: “What I write here or elsewhere will probably interest only a few curious people spaced out over the years. Every twenty-five or thirty years one will exhumen in some confidential publications my name and some excerpts, always the same ones. The children’s poems will have survived a little longer than the rest. I will belong to the chapter of limited curiosity. “How wrong was he! Arrested and deported to Theresienstadt where he died of exhaustion in 1945, he remained the inspired man that Eluard wrote: “Throughout his poems the idea of ​​freedom runs like a terrible fire.” (Inspired by the article Poems for children by Robert Desnos – Encrypted odes to the Resistance, Johanna Luyssen – Release of 12 June 2015.)