At the beginning of May 1942, on the point of embarking for Tunis, I had the joy of seeing Valéry again; he had come to join me at Marseilles. He who, so often, in Paris, weighed down’ by cares, duties and obligations, gave evidence of a painful fatigue, appeared to me, during those two days of sun and holiday we spent together, rested, as though rejuvenated, in full possession of his worth, more alive, more loving, more expansive than in the best times of his youth. An extraordinary gaiety animated his eloquent remarks, and I remained dazzled by the resources of his intelligence, charmed by his ease and affectionate grace.
When, after my three years’ exile in North Africa, I was finally able to reach France, I found Paul Valéry again, older than I had allowed myself to expect. “I am at the end of my rope,” he said to me, secretly attacked by the disease that soon became evident. Stomach ulcers, hemorrhages, pulmonary congestion … for a month in bed, penicillin, blood transfusions; the most constant care of those nearest to him only succeeded in prolonging the atrocious pains. The few times I was able to see him again, the suffering imprinted on his features made him almost unrecognizable. At the time of my next to the last visit, he kept me a long time at his bedside, one of my hands held tightly between both of his, as though he expected from that contact a sort of mystical transfusion. He made an effort to speak to me and, for a long time leaning over him, I made an effort to understand him, but could not, alas! get anything from his mouth but indistinct words. He had, nevertheless, kept his perfect presence of mind; and a few days sooner, was still taking some pleasure, some comfort at least, in reading; a huge bound volume lay on his bed; it was Voltaire’s Essay on the Spirit and Customs of Nations; of that Voltaire of whom he said, at the Sorbonne, the 10th of December, 1944: “He is the man of highest intelligence, the most subtle of humans, the most ready, the most awake … possessing, up to the last day, springs of reactivity seemingly inexhaustible.” Did he think as he wrote this that those words could be just as well applied to him?
I still read in that very last lecture of Valéry’s these sentences in which, painting Voltaire, he paints himself: “Everything excites his desires to know, to reduce, to combat; everything is food for him and serves to feed that fire, so clear, so bright, where a perpetual transmutation is at work … where the genius of disassociation resolves every appearance of truth that drags on into the century and which still imposes itself on the indolence of the minds.”
O least indolent of beings! you, animated, both by that “genius of disassociation,” and by a splendid poetic genius that did not visit Voltaire at all, you fought ceaselessly with the loyal arms of the Mind alone, for durable and pacific victories. While shadows besiege us on all sides, through you France spreads a radiance over the world; and what you bring to the world can not be taken from us.
10 PAUL VALÉRY
NOTHING could do more or better honor to our provisional government than those glorious obsequies given officially, with ceremonies worthy of the most eminent representative of the French genius, to Paul Valéry, whose radiance maintains the primacy of our country over the spiritual world in spite of our historic reverses and our misfortune.
This recognition was all the more remarkable and surprising, for the signal worth of Paul Valéry escapes popular favor. That he has been, indirectly and as though he did not wish it, of immense service to France, is something that could only be appreciated by a very small number. His activity, disinterested in public affairs, exercised itself in a restricted domain, indifferent to events, but where, unknown to us, our destinies play. “Events bore me,” he said. “Events are the froth of things. It is the sea that interests me. It is in the sea that one fishes; it is on it that one sails; it is in that one dives.…”
And no one dove deeper.
* * * *
From his youth a secret ambition activates him, of such a nature that I can not imagine a more noble one; in comparison with it, Balzac’s heroes make us smile. On the secular or worldly plane, where the game is played for the latter, Valéry will succeed moreover and, furthermore, better than any of them; he knows how honors are obtained, what they are worth, and what they cost in peace of mind. He will accept the price, if it should only be to show others and to prove conclusively to himself that there is nothing there he can not attain; a matter of earning the right to scorn all that. For he has a tendency to despise everything; that is his strength. The domination he wishes is something entirely different; it is that of the mind. The rest appears laughable to him. To dominate not the mind of others but his own; to get acquainted with its functioning, make himself master of it in order to dispose of it at his will, it is to that he continuously applies his effort. Curious Narcissus; to dominate the mind by the mind. From then on the result hardly matters to him; the product, no, but the means to obtain it; when he wishes, as he wishes, to be capable of.… “My nature is potential,” he said. It is fortunate for us that Valéry thought he should apply his method to literary ends; now, he said: “It is in the domain of Letters I could exist the most easily.” But from then on he will consider his most admirable poems, his most accomplished prose essays, as the “Q. E. D.” of exercises1—that is how he designates his Jeune Parque (Young Fate), — and as for that supreme method he applies to it, I do not doubt he would have been able to exercise it in all other fields with just as victorious results. Yes, I imagine Paul Valéry an equally great statesman, great diplomat, financier, man of science, engineer or doctor. And I happen even to doubt if he would not have been able to excel in architecture, in painting or in music, as he did in poetry, although it requires particular gifts, but ones that Valéry possessed almost equally.
Following the example of Edgar Poe, he took this as a premise: that the artist (painter, poet or musician) should count not on his own emotion, but on the one he wishes to provoke in the listener, the spectator or the reader. Just like the actor whom Diderot praises, in his Paradox on the Comedian, it is not a question of being moved oneself, but of moving. Both Leonardo da Vinci and Wagner proceeded that way. Valéry refuses to believe in the Muse of the Romantics, makes fun of what is called “inspiration.” He adopted with pleasure the words of Flaubert: “Inspiration? That consists of sitting down to the table at the same time every day.” Up to the very end of his life, Valéry, rising before dawn, worked until the distracting awakening of others.
He worked in Descartes’ fashion, I suppose; not at first on such or such a work exactly, but in delving into the last entrenchments of his thought. For nearly twenty years, while his companions of the out-set did their utmost at productions he judged of little importance, Valéry kept silent and searched. Before every work of merit, the question came to him: how was it obtained? The dish served claimed him less than the importance of the recipe. He turned up his nose at the risky sparks of genius. And from the first he could not bear to be duped. While still very young (we were not yet twenty years old when there began between us that inestimable relationship which death alone came to interrupt), he had pinned on the wall of his room the famous precept: “Remember to distrust yourself” (I have forgotten how that is expressed in Greek). Distrust which he applied to everything, to beings, to things, to convictions, to professions of faith, above all to words, those atoms, and one knows what latent energy the decomposition of the latter sets in motion.