French poet born in Quimper and who died in the Drancy concentration camp in the north east Paris suburb. After having left his native Brittany he spent the first years of the century in Montmartre where he shared his bohemian lifestyle with Pablo Picasso, Francis Carco, André Salmon and Guillaume Apollinaire. Jewish by origin, he became a Catholic in 1909, a conversion which few years later led him to retire to the Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire abbey, where the German police would arrest him. His work is marked by the convergence of two major characteristics: on the one hand the fantastic, which abandons itself to verbal acrobatics and doesn’t forego the most unbridled burlesque (see Le Cornet à dés, a collection of poems in prose published in 1917); the other is an anguish which comes to the surface behind the mask of humour and inspires writings imbued with mysticism (Méditations religieuses, a posthumous collection, published in 1947).