Lord Patchogue and Other Texts

Dandy, drug addict, Dadaist, gigolo, suicide: Rigaut’s stories and morbid observations embody his short and perfectly pointless existence."I shall make a fine corpse,” wrote Jacques Rigaut (1898-1929). He was as good as his word. Throughout his short life he never ceased to write and talk about his suicide. “Try, if you can, to arrest a man who travels with suicide in his buttonhole.” “Suicide is a vocation.” An important member of the Paris Dada movement, Rigaut’s greatest contribution was perhaps his total world-weariness and his black humour. One recent dictionary of Surrealism has called him the greatest nihilist dandy in French literature. Utterly narcissistic (“Every mirror bears my name”), completely disinterested in exterior reality, ironical and self-deprecating, he gave new meaning to the term disillusionment. This selection presents all Rigaut’s prinipal writings, many of which were incomplete at his death and were only published posthumously.