Paul Valéry

Elle tiendrait d’ailleurs en six lignes [...]“ (1. X. 1929). – „[...] je vous autorise à traduire pour votre Revue, mais exclusivement pour elle, mon étude sur Stendhal. Je désire toutefois que la traduction soit mise sous mes yeux avant tirage. Mais cette étude va paraître dans mon volume Variété III à la N.R.F. dans trois semaines. De plus, un contrat pour la traduction de ce volume et son édition en Amérique a été conclu par la N.R.F. et moi-même avec la maison Harcourt & Brace. Dans ces conditions, mon autorisation est insuffisante et vous devez obtenir aussi celle de M. Gallimard [...]“ (15. X. 1929). – Partly with small damage to edges and old fold..

Du reste, mes sentiments pour vous, pourraient eux-mêmes se trouver froissés à droite ou à gauche par je ne sais qui." Valéry had imagined a "dialogue between a certain group" and Mallarmé that has a "long association through reading and the Tuesdays" and could do without the "eternal restarts of the negotiations". Thus, he draws a "bitter philosophical conclusion, as is customary", wondering if this "incoherence between advice and execution" shows how little "the ideas of unity and continuous efforts" that produce "the rare new forms of thinking and of writing" have penetrated society, "even in an elite" and alludes to Edgar Allen Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", although misrepresenting Poe's allegorization of the Roman Goddess Laverna. - Paul Valéry's motives for backing out were more personally than he would admit in the letter. The Mardiste André-Ferdinand Hérold had invited Léon Dierx and Catulle Mendès against Vallery's wishes. Mendès, on the other hand, was offended as the invitation only reached him on the day before the dinner. Asking Mallarmé directly if he wished for him to come, the response must not have been very encouraging, as Mendès ultimately declined. Valéry didn't know about Mendès' decision when he wrote the letter at hand. Mallarmé responded with encouragement, asking Valéry to come for his sake and underlining that he did indeed remember what has been agreed upon. The dinner took place at the famous Cabaret du Père Lathuille in Batignolles. While Mallarmé was very pleased with the event, Claude Debussy was afraid that people might have noticed how bored he was, judging from the expression of his face. - Traces of folds. Well preserved..

Both the manuscript and the typescript comprise several versions of only a few paragraphs of the long introduction. The recurring first phrase of the manuscript is: "La France est le pays du monde où les considérations de la forme, le souci singulier de la forme en soi ait persisté, et même se soit imposé dans les temps modernes" ("France is the one country in the world where questions of form, the singular concern for form in itself, have persisted and even imposed themselves in modern times"). The unsystematically numbered typescript represents passages that are more descriptive of France as a country, trying to establish links between the people and their historical and natural environment. The different versions of the poetic first phrases depict France as harmonious in its geographical diversity: "La terre de France est remarquable par la netteté de sa figure, par les différences de ses parties, par l’équilibre général de cette diversité de régions qui se conviennent et se complètent. Une sorte de proportion assez heureuse existe dans ce pays entre la plaine et la hauteur, entre la montagne et la mer, entre l'étendue intérieure et le développement des côtes, et sur les côtes mêmes, entre les plages, les roches, les falaises [...]." - A beautiful condensation of Valéry's patriotic sentiments is a sentence added by hand to one of the typed pages: "La France tombe, se reléve, se restreint, reprend sa grandeur, redéchire soi-même se reconcentre" ("France falls, rises again, restrains herself, regains her greatness, tears herself apart again, refocuses"). Valéry revised and extended this phrase for the final version. - Stronger browning of the typescript and occasional tears. The first page of the manuscript is dust-stained, showing several minor tears. With editing marks in crayon..