For a time, Aimable Jayet works as a butcher in Paris. In about 1934, he starts displaying signs of mental imbalance and, following an attempted suicide, he is interned in the Saint-Alban hospital. There, he starts to write in schoolbooks, on packing paper, and on rags. His output is founded on the principle of symmetry. Often deployed over two facing pages, his writings are accompanied by illustrations, to the point that the words, which he always declines in their masculine and feminine form, combine with the images to form an inextricable whole.