Pierre Minet was born in 1909 in Reims, where as a child he met the teenagers who would later become the poetic group The Great Game. At the age of sixteen, he fled to Paris and lived there without money or an address, sleeping in cafes, the Luxembourg gardens or the quays of the Seine, and systematically abandoning all the jobs that were offered to him. During that time he will be related to all kinds of characters from bohemia and the Parisian underworld.