"Why have you raised me so high only to let me fall afterwards? Is it a pleasure for you to break, to spoil, to make the sublime understood and to precipitate me into an abyss?" A century after her meeting with André Breton, the question posed by Nadja resonates particularly. The woman who inspired Breton's eponymous masterpiece, Nadja, remained for a long time imprisoned by the character she had become, until she was overcome by a devouring anxiety and was hospitalized in an asylum. She had not lost her lucidity, as evidenced by her letters to Breton, now published by Gallimard. Alban Cerisier, secretary general of Gallimard editions, noted that the book deserves to reach a wide audience, as it resonates with current concerns regarding mental distress and the fate that society reserves for the feeling of love. Léona Delcourt was born near Lille in 1902 to working-class parents and became a single mother at 17. On October 4, 1926, when she met Breton, she was living in Paris, where she was trying to make it as an actress and dancer. The Parisian wandering described in Nadja, the book, echoes the social and emotional wandering of Léona Delcourt. According to Cerisier, her meeting with Breton "precipitated the disaster of a woman already detached from common reality, already in her inner world, as he himself describes." This reality is also that of Breton, now questioned by these letters. The letters of Léona-Nadja, written from October 22, 1926, to February 25, 1927, were published by Gallimard. These letters are described as a very limited, very tense corpus, with a unit of place, action, and time: they take place over a few weeks. These are the letters before the madness, before the abyss from which she would never emerge. There is here an extraordinary human testimony, in the literal sense of the word, but also the letters of a woman in distress, yet perfectly lucid about what was happening to her. Notably regarding the non-reciprocity of her love for Breton. "I have only tears left and my teeth chew kisses," writes Léona. Or again: "Understand this letter with the end of my breath, because it is the beginning of yours." The one who was long reduced to the role of a muse thus shaped her own universe. She signed the drawing "Un regard d'or," reproduced since 1972 on the Folio cover of Nadja, and others, as troubling as magnetic, are discovered in these Letters to André Breton. A publication that also contributes to shifting the perspective on the writer and his surroundings. "This engages our vision of the writer, sometimes too essentialized, and makes him enter into relationship networks we did not suspect, notes Alban Cerisier. It highlights female figures who were much more than simple muses, real interlocutors, with poetic, romantic, philosophical aspirations, and in tension with the work." This fits into the desire to put women back at the center of the surrealist village. In recent years, several exhibitions have largely contributed to this. During the centenary exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, Joyce Mansour, Dorothea Tanning, Edith Rimmington, and Suzanne Van Damme occupied a prominent place. "Everyone can be surrealist," told Marine Serré, curator of modern collections at the Centre Pompidou. "And from there, it is a space of absolute emancipation and liberation. That is why women who did not have access to schools in the 1920s could find their place in surrealism." She recalled that in 1936, the surrealist exhibition in London already counted 20% of women: "It is not a reinterpretation to grant them such an important place." On March 21, the police intervenes as Léona, in full crisis, is a victim of hallucinations. She will spend the last fourteen years of her life in a psychiatric institution before dying, aged only 38, of typhus, or of starvation, during World War II, under a Vichy government seeking to eliminate the "mad." In the inventory of her belongings drawn up at the time of her hospitalization, among some clothes and a handbag, this detail: "1 single glove."