Boris Vian

Trained as an engineer at the École Centrale, Vian lived an incandescent, frantic artistic life driven by the knowledge of a damaged heart from childhood rheumatic fever. Playing trumpet in underground jazz cellars with Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, he became the soul of existentialist Saint-Germain.

Under his real name, he wrote L'Écume des jours (1947), a poetic masterpiece of surrealist romance where a water lily grows in Chloé's lung; under the American pseudonym Vernon Sullivan, his hardboiled novel J'irai cracher sur vos tombes became a scandalous bestseller. His anti-war ballad Le Déserteur was banned by the government during the Indochina War.