Youki and the great French surrealist poet were married shortly after they met at La Coupole. We do not know about any grand gestures that might have occurred during courtship. We only know of the ones that followed after:

The Gestapo came to the couple’s rooms on February 22, 1944 looking for a list of names of Resistance workers. Robert Desnos alone was there and refused to give the list to them — though they found it eventually hidden at the back of a book binding. Even then, he would not give up his friends, insisting to the Nazis they’d only found a list of art critics.

Loyal to his wife until the end, Desnos had received a call warning him to leave before the Nazis arrived. He chose not to flee, since he feared that Youki Desnos would be tortured in his place. Instead, he helped another man, Alain Brieux, to escape. “Robert had time to escape,” Youki wrote later in her memoirs. “He stayed there just to protect me.”

Later, Desnos died in a Czech concentration camp — from typhoid, ironically, weeks after the camp’s liberation. One of his most famous poems, “Letter to Youki”, was written for her after his initial arrest and deportation to Auschwitz.

Here is his last poem as translated by Kenneth Rexroth. It seems to be to Youki, as Keats’s “This Living Hand” might well have been to Fanny Brawne.

LAST POEM
Terezina Concentration Camp, May 1945

I have dreamed so much of you,
Walked so often, talked so often with you,
Loved your shadow so much.
Nothing is left me of you.
Nothing is left of me but a shadow among shadows,
A being a hundred times more shadowy than a shadow,
A shadowy being who comes, and comes again, in your sunlit life.

– Robert Desnos