The life of Paul Eluard holds a remarkable number of mysteries for that of a man who became prominent rather young and whose friends frequently made a particular effort to have themselves talked about. Specifically, three crises from the first period of his career, when he was attached to the surrealist movement, are either avoided or barely mentioned by biographers: the strange disappearance from Paris in 1924 which turned out to be a trip around the world; the breakup of Eluard's first marriage in 1930; and the rupture with Breton and the surrealists in 1938. Our ignorance about these questions does not stem from a lack of witnesses, but rather from the tendency of some of the poet's friends to withhold information for reasons of tact, and the tendency of others to write with such an evident bias that their testimony is unreliable. Doubtless we will soon be better informed, since every year new documents appear, and the reasons for restraint or excess become regularly less compelling.