Autograph letter signed to the writer Robert Desnos. Ville-Evrard, November 13, 1940, Robert Desnos; 2 pages in-4° on letterhead from the café "Le Dôme". Usage plaice

Magnificent letter full of despair from Antonin Artaud under the influence of Satan who asks his friend Robert Desnos to help him: "You too, you know Desnos, since Monday that sin and evil exist and that it is they who produced existence in pain and pain...and you know that they are beings since you have seen them and there are billions of millions who have occupied spaces for eons. And they are flesh and blood. I've had them here for over a year, mutilating me and preventing any relief. But if every living French person, with rare exceptions who are all marked with a sign, is a damned person, there are in the streets and in the houses, millions and millions of dead people who have been kept alive by evil and who lived there welcomed in the Past and who return night after night because each new day that reappears and passes has been taken back by Satan in the Past at the cost each time, for me, of a new horror and a new mutilation and this in order to keep in this world the presence of an Evil that I spend my days killing. I can't take any more of this unholy struggle and I must be relieved, Robert Desnos. Come see me here as soon as possible and do what you can for me. Tell Youki that I also saw her fight against evil and that I haven't forgotten her either. I am your affectionately. Antonin Artaud. Tristan Tzara must make one last effort"

On November 8, 1937, the prefect of Seine-Inférieure declared Antoine Artaud "dangerous for public order and the safety of people", followed by his internment in the Quatre-Mares psychiatric asylum. He is put in a straitjacket. In April 1938, his mother obtained his transfer to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric center where he remained for eleven months. In 1939 he was interned at the Ville-Évrard hospital, for three years and eleven months, for reasons of "Delusional syndrome of paranoid structure, active ideas of persecution, poisoning, split personality. Psychic excitement at intervals. Old drug addiction. ". The conditions are precarious, due to rationing, he suffers numerous electroshocks. Robert Desnos and Paul Eluard intervene with Doctor Ferdière so that he takes care of Antonin Artaud in his psychiatric hospital in Rodez. He was admitted there in 1943. During his internments, he never stopped writing letters.