It is not easy to be adulated of alive sound nor to officially make a career of man of letters. It is however what did Valéry, intellectual and poet of an enlightened middle-class which scorned, in this first half of the XX ^E century, neither the spirit nor the culture, provided that they took fashionable and polished forms.

It does not matter that its thought was difficult, its dense and sometimes obscure poetry: those which devoted it hardly read it, satisfied to admit in him the idea that they were done of a spirit cultivated, of a man of taste, able to write with elegance on all the subjects, to allure like lecturer, and to leave in the memories the few brilliant formulas that each one could end up taking for his.

Although he hated, for the same reasons, the anecdote, the biography and the novel, Valéry evoked itself two dates, true loves at first sight which had decided, by the breaks that they had produced in his life, of its spiritual adventure: 1892 and 1921, at the same time sentimental and intellectual crises acute, crises of youth and the ripe age too. Born in Sète in 1871, Paul Valéry had only twenty and one years when it crossed the terrible night from Friday to: “Appalling Night, last on my bed - storm everywhere - my room dazzling by each flash. And all my fate was played in my head. I am between me and me…” (Personal Notes).

Then in love insane with certain Mrs. de Rovira, plunged in the doubt and wounded, it decides in the morning to give up the sensitivity and all to subject to the intelligence, while moving away at the same time from the literature, which it considers debilitating. It is by it however that it had started, afterwards studies with the college of Sète (which it adored because it dominated the city and the sea) and its years of right to Montpellier. It is because of the sea that he dreamed to pass the contest of the Naval college: the Mediterranean, with its colors, its perfumes, its landscapes, enchanted its youth, and it is never dépris of this love.

Any young person, it wrote already poems - “Narcisse speaks” appeared in the Conch (directed by Pierre Louÿs), in 1891 -; he also read some: Rimbaud and Verlaine, Gautier, Baudelaire, Hugo, over any Mallarmé. At the same time, it was impassioned for the drawing, the music, mathematics, architecture. Thanks to Louÿs, it met at the time of its first stay in Paris (1891) Gide and Mallarmé. It was not to give up the frequentation of these literary circles, even after the crisis of 1892. Installed with Paris in 1894 - in a tiny room of the street Gay-Lussac where it places a black board and the reproduction of the skeleton of Ligier Richier -, it works to transpose the adventure of the spirit, starting from the character of Leonardo da Vinci (Introduction to the method of Leonardo da Vinci, 1894) initially, then starting from imaginary Mr. Teste (Mr Teste, made up of ten texts which forms a cycle which extends over thirty years, of 1896 to 1926). Leonardo da Vinci is only the figure-head of a universal, rebellious spirit with any sterilizing specialization, and its method consists in accepting all the thoughts, even most hazardous, and exploring all the combinations of them.

The text valéryen endeavors to give an account of the play of the thought and the mental theater which is worked out (Valéry took literally, in several of its works, this image of the “theater of the thought”), by releasing the laws of composition which govern creation and which result from combinative. Consequently, it displays the close connections which bind all the productions of the human spirit, abolishes the naive distinctions between sciences and arts by a structuralist interrogation before structuralism even.

Since 1891, the short text of the Paradox on the architect had shown it attentive with the idea of composition, idea founder for him and which is found in the middle of the Socratic dialog of Eupalinos (1921), just as it governs the architecture of its greater poems (in particular of the marine Cemetery). The cycle of Mr Teste, made up by the bits of an anti-novel, a kind of “novel of the spirit” (the only novel acceptable for Valéry, which denounces arbitrary romantic kind everywhere), puts in scene a intellectual narrator and Mr Teste, man a forty year old which incarnates the pure intelligence and compromisings: he also sought the laws of the spirit and, because it very understood, can neither act any more nor to judge. Dream of an absolute intellectual purity, Mr. Teste can only be about it the witness (testis, in Latin).

After the Evening with Mr. Teste, and at the same time as it decides to hold each day a book where it notes his reflections (into fifty and one years it thus filled 261 books which CNRS published in 29 volumes of 1957 to 1961), Valéry is withdrawn in a deep silence which it will break only in 1912. It enters to the ministry for the War as writer, then becomes in 1900, a few weeks after its marriage with the niece of Berthe Morisot, the secretary of Edouard Lebey, managing director of the Havas agency.

From 1894 to 1898, it had not ceased attending Mallarmé, his true spiritual father (“it is a mixture of hatred and love, an intimacy without mercy”, it in its Books notes), and it was very affected by the death of the poet. In 1903 is born Claude, his son, and three years later his/her Agathe daughter.

Valéry, that its trade led to attend money men, seems lost for the literature when in 1912 Gide and Gaston Gallimard ask for the right to him of publish its old poems. Valéry takes again and composes the Young person Parks (1917): it had envisaged a poem of 40 worms, the text counts of them 511 and had asked for three years of work to him. The project was the following: “To make a prolonged song, without action, only the inconsistency on the borders of sleep; to put as much intellectuality at it than I could do it and than poetry can about it admit under its veils; to save the nearest abstraction by the music, or to repurchase it by visions.” One can describe the way of the poem as the movement which goes from the sleep to the awakening of the young girl (Parks who weaves the wire of the life of the mortals), of unconcern to the extreme desire, the flesh to the intelligence, the temptation of death and nothing (it was going to be thrown to the sea) to the acceptance of the life and the solar beauty of the world. The Young person Parks returned Valéry celebrates at once.

In 1920, the Album of old worms (which gathers texts written between 1890 and 1900) appeared at Adrienne Monnier, twenty poems, all marked by the heritage of Heredia, Verlaine, of symbolism, and which deserve their title well: old worms indeed, old forms, in full poetic hobby-horse and surrealist revolution. But Valéry was always made a glory refuse the new one: “The new one is one of these exciting poisons which end up being more necessary than any food… It is strange to stick thus to the perishable share of the things, which is exactly their quality to be new.” (Things kill).

With the Young person Parks, Valéry had really made return to poetry, and of this return the vibrating memory of Mallarmé had been the mediator. Consequently it takes the practice to read with his friends, at Adrienne Monnier, of the poems which will compose the collection of Charms (1922): the marine Cemetery is published in the NRF in June 1920, before being collected in Charmes, major work of Valéry poet, work of maturity also (Charms will find its form final only in 1929). Asserted by holding of “pure poetry” like their Master, devoted like the largest alive French poet by an investigation of the review Knowledge, Valéry leaves Havas in February 1922. A new career opens with him: a large number of conferences (in Switzerland, at the end of 1922, on poetry, the crisis of the spirit, Mallarmé; in Brussels, in 1923, on Baudelaire; in London, the same year, on Baudelaire and Hugo; in Milan, the following year, which enables him to meet the Italian great writer D' Annunzio), direction of the Commerce review, at the sides of Valery Larbaud and Leon-Paul Fargue, publication of the first volume of Variety (1924), whose publication spreads out over twenty years.

Elected the French Academy in 1925 and received under the Cupola in 1927, it succeeds Anatole France (of which it will be arranged not to pronounce the name in its speech, in memory of Mallarmé, that France had criticized of the years before). Rhumbs in 1926, followed of Others rhumbs in 1927, say the taste valéryen for the aphoristic writing, which one finds in Mélange (1939), in Impure thoughts and others: if a rhumb is a nautical term, indicating a surface of wind (11015 delimited by the two points of the pink of the compass of navy), the titles of the other in the same way composed collections evoke the thoughts which are born under the feather, taking the form of jokes, formulas, of fragments, without preoccupation with an ordered and articulated speech. Thought fragmentary (without front, afterwards), thought unverifiable, without claim with the truth, asserting on the contrary its disorder and its contradictions. Such as it is I (1941) gathers the texts published before in Choses kill, Moralité, Littérature; Such as it is II (1943) gathers Rhumbs, Others rhumbs, Analecta, Suite. Valéry speaks there about very with broken sticks, but especially, nevertheless, about the intelligence and the literature.

Faithful still to the taste mallarméen for the scene, the opera, the musical poems, Valéry makes exploit, musics of Arthur Honegger, Amphion in 1931, follow-up, in 1934, “melodrama” of Sémiramis.

The writer begins the publication of his complete Works (11 volumes of 1931 to 1939) and makes appear a text, Regards on the current world, important because it shows - as the “quasi political Tests” of Variety - Valéry retained by the topicality (even if its tests are not always very lucid: one underlined much, rightly, the blindness of Valéry on the rise of Fascisms and his very diplomatic prudence).

In 1931 still, it gives Parts on art which have the merit to show the coherence of its choices: Direct, Picasso, Klee are rejected into darkness, their work meaning, according to Valéry, only the decline of the modern world, while Corot, Manet and especially Degas “are saved” (the Degas study, dance, drawing were added to the work in 1938). The obsession of the decline is old at the poet (one already found it in the Paradox on architecture): against this danger, which ends up killing civilizations, it has all its life mobilized work, the reason, the clear conscience, the classicism, which implied the dislike of the inspiration, of the manifestations of unconscious, the madness, the romanticism, i.e. also of all the side living of the modern art.

Valéry became a European character: when it goes to Rome in 1933, it is received by Mussolini; in 1935 he becomes member of the Academy of Science of Lisbon; he meets the Horthy regent in 1936 in Budapest and, when he is named with a pulpit of poetic at the Collège de France (1937), an huge crowd awaits it. Throughout these years the publication of Variety continues: five volumes in all, of 1924 to 1944, where tests are found, forewords, speech on very diverse subjects. Valéry proposed itself a classification by fields: Literary studies, philosophical Studies, quasi political Tests, poetic and esthetic Theory, Teaching, Memories of the poet. The texts are as different as the headings suggest it, energy of a “Foreword to the Letters Persians” with a “Speech with the surgeons”, of a “Note on the idea of didacture” to the “inaugural Lesson of the course of poetic”, of a study of “Phèdre woman” to the “Note-book of a poet”. Naturally the choices appear, as much in the presences that in the absences. Variety is perhaps the “young” text more of Valéry: not only by the diversity of the forms, but also by the necessary inscription in the history and the topicality of the majority of the texts, which show an intellectual in his time.

The war touches Valéry: directly, since it is relieved by Vichy of its station in the Mediterranean Center of Nice to have pronounced with the French Academy a praise of Bergson, which has just died; indirectly more still, since it comes to confirm the pessimistic analyzes which it had already led on the transformations of the Western companies. Under the Occupation, it translates the Bucolics of Virgile (appeared in a posthumous way, in 1955), adheres in 1943 to the National front of the writers and works in My Faust, which will appear in 1946, one year after its death, which has occurred on on July 20th, 1945: at the request of the de Gaulle general, it receives the honors of state funeral.

Its last work had made him find the character of Faust, well done to haunt it. Work is unfinished: there remain about it the first three acts of a comedy, Lust, the young lady of crystal, as well as the fragments of a fairyhood, the Recluse or the Curses of Universe. She proclaims, by the voice of Faust, the ecstasy of the rediscovered life and found youth, against the knowledge, the books, and perhaps even the intelligence. She says the price of tenderness and a certain taste of the women, whose Valéry was hardly usual, or which at least he did not assert very high, although he tested it: the last discoveries of criticism valéryenne show the richness of a love life which it had known to keep secret.

Of the poet buried, as he had asked, in the small marine cemetery of Sète, the image was scrambled. Reflections remain, some splendid worms (and in particular those of the marine Cemetery) and this bet, strange today, to describe the adventure of the spirit by seizing the mystery of its combinations. As well waves absorbed regular poetry as his smells of the past, less the charm which often sticks to it: it is controlled too much, too intellectualized. As for its reflections, they are often of circumstance. Valéry was mistaken: it is by the fiction that one continues, or by the autobiography; these are its Books that it is necessary to read today.