The periodical Les Lettres Françaises was founded in 1942 under the direction of Jacques Decour and Jean Paulhan, advised by Louis Aragon. Published in secret until the Liberation, it attracted the support of intellectuals belonging to the Resistance, and aimed at defending a national literature, with a view to its rebirth at the Liberation. It was in the years, that the ideological orientation of the paper was established, when it became the intellectual organ of the Communist party. Searching as he was for his own voice and wanting to break with the style of Gustav Mahler, which was dominant in Vienna at that time, he travelled a few kilometres from there to find a sorcerer who, in a little house in the suburbs, spent his days cutting up sounds into bundles of 12, and then bringing this strange harmonic dust to the boil in Wagnerian test tubes. His study had the atmosphere of a laboratory.