A Belgian francophone poet, who became a naturalised Frenchman in 1955, and who died in Paris, where he had established himself in 1924. Raised by Jesuits at the Collège Saint-Michel de Bruxelles, and already gripped by existential anxieties, he discovered the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but it was later – after having abandoned his medical studies and during the time he voyaged on the high seas as a sailor – that he read Lautréamont, the poet who spurred him to write. Qui je fus (1927) already conveys his interrogations in the face of the world’s opaqueness and an obstinate wariness as regards the so-called transparency of language. From this springs an oeuvre rich in lexical discoveries and other verbal acrobatics, not lacking humour, which suffer from an original injury of a metaphysical nature: La nuit remue (1935) and Plume (1938), notably, bear witness to this astonishing as much as troubling inventiveness, served by a prose handled like a laser. An explorer of the human enigma as well as numerous of the planet’s regions (Ecuador, 1929; Un barbare en Asie, 1933), he was also that of the unconscious, to this end leaning on psychoactive substances such as mescaline. From such experiments, carried out with the supervision of a doctor, today remain drawings and paintings, other creations of a personality who is always ready to listen to his ‘interior voices’ and constantly curious about his ‘inside space.’