Les chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror) is a key work of nineteenth-century French literature, written by the Comte de Lautréamont, the pseudonym of Isidore Lucien Ducasse. First published in parts between 1868 and 1869, it has since become a cult classic, profoundly influencing the surrealists, dadaists, and modernist writers and artists of the twentieth century.

Ducasse (1846–70) grew up in Montevideo, Uruguay in a French family, and moved to France in 1859 to further his education. He died from consumption in Paris at the age of 24, cutting short a promising and daringly experimental literary career.

Les chants de Maldoror does not have a plot as such, being is a sprawling, often disturbing, poetic narrative composed of hallucinatory and violent imagery, ironic invocations, sexual allusions and philosophical rants. The central character, Maldoror, is a misanthropic, almost demonic figure who declares war on religion, humanity and morality alike. The prose is lyrical, meandering, and rich in metaphor, frequently shifting tones, perspectives, and narrative voices.

Though largely ignored when it was first published, Les chants de Maldoror was rediscovered in the early tentiethth century, becoming a key text for surrealist artists and writers including André Breton, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst. Breton called Ducasse ‘a surrealist before surrealism’, quoting what is probably its best-known line, ‘It was as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella upon an operating table.’

Maldoror clearly spoke to Armand Simon’s imagination and creativity, and between 1923 and the late 1940s he returned to it again and again for inspiration, producing hundreds of surrealist-inspired drawings. Many have a clearly sexual element, though more in a symbolist than a figurative context, and it is possible to interpret much of the work in terms of relationship, power, self-exploration and human struggle.