ABSTRACT
This chapter sets in context André Breton's initial movements after demobilisation, when, having rejoined his wife and child, he sought shelter with his friend and colleague Pierre Mabille, first in Salon-de-Provence and then in Martigues, close to Marseilles. It shows how the shift already represented in Breton's Second Manifeste, together with the strong influence of Pierre Mabille, and his own research into occultism thereafter, began to shape a new trajectory in the course of his work. The chapter examines what Breton meant by "myth", looking also at his concept of "the sublime point" and establishing the first appearance of both in his early writing and their passage throughout his work. By the summer of 1940 Breton had become "the great undesirable" of his own self-assessment: Dying Heraclitus, Pierre de Lune, Sade, the cyclone with head of a millet seed, the anteater: his greatest desire would have been to belong to the family of great undesirables.
