“The first bullfight that Michel Leiris ever saw, which involved young bulls and no picadors, took place in the arena of Fréjus, one August Sunday in 1926. It was, as he was to later recount in Grande fuite de neige, a horrible bloodbath. ‘Far from being discouraged, however, I felt impatient to see one in which the animal’s death was not ridiculed, but rather brought to a just measure of sacrifice or tragedy.’ How many of those who had the misfortune to see an unrewarding slaughter on their first visit to a bullring actually had the courage to go back? How many of them have been able to discover a promise of plenitude and beauty, or in Leiris’s words, of sacrifice and tragedy in that first—and oft repeated—butchery? Gautier did not go back to the theatre in Vitoria, nor did Manet return to the Madrid bullring. The fact is they lacked neither courage nor patience; they simply did not sympathise with excess. As Hermann Broch has shown, Romantic pathos is almost always exhausted in domestic matters. One must forget Géricault, Delacroix and Edgar Allen (sic) Poe; their melancholy gives them away, releasing them from the first and foremost Romantic fear: that there should be no running water.”