Radiguet, Rigaut, Crevel… The other shooting stars of the 20th century

There is a dark corner in our Republic of Letters, a square that welcomes authors broke in the prime of life, poets with meteorite lives, novelists who died tragically, like Jean-Rene Huguenin. Illness, accident, suicide, war will have got the better of talents gone far too soon. No need to go back to Lautréamont or Jules Laforgue, both dead far from their native Montevideo, at 27, the age when the flayed rock will give up the ghost.

It is a true martyrology that runs through our XX^e century and the beginning of the next. The list is long ; we will retain a few names, which have survived their era, leaving in their wake like a luminous powder of a comet’s tail. Alain-Fournier, killed on the front in 1914, had opened the sad ball. will follow Raymond Radiguet, struck down at the age of 20, in 1923, and the first surrealists, who had chosen voluntary death. Among them, Jacques Rigautleft before 30 years, and leaving a work exclusively…