I recall the reading out loud he began, from some eloquent discourse or other of Barrès’ (we were sitting together in a little cafe on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, near the ministry of war where he then occupied a very modest position as employe). Smiling he swelled out his voice, then, leaving the text, but without changing the tone and as though “linking it up,” he continued to the conclusion: “And one sees rising up the spectre (a beat) of hideous facility.” He held everything easy in scorn, in horror. Whence his untiring exigency toward himself, that was to take him so far. Meanwhile, he produced nothing.
Nevertheless his silence began to worry us. Certain colleagues spoke of it ironically: “Well! your great Valéry, so well begun!.. He contents himself with those few youthful poems; fine promises to be sure. Now he is silent. He will always be silent. Confess you have overrated him a little. He has given out already.…” He was taken for a trifler, already almost a “flunker.”
However, his conversation remained dazzling to such a degree that sometimes I came to fear he would satisfy himself with it. I feared also for him the lure of mathematics, in view of his love of precision. It was not before a table full of white paper that he worked then, but before an enormous blackboard, very cumbersome for the modest little room he occupied at that time.1 He traced on it strange signs, complicated equations of which I did not understand an iota, formulas he explained to me at length, in spite of my incompetency; for he cared very little whether he was understood or not; it was more for himself and to himself that he spoke than for others. From that the lack of care he expended on his delivery which, up to the end of his life, remained very faulty; it often happened that his flock at the College of France, at the Vieux-Colombier, at the Sorbonne or elsewhere, had to content itself with seeing him and give up understanding him, not being able, as in a private conversation, to beg him to repeat his sentences. Besides, he often contented himself with any listener at all, provided that the latter seemed to him to pay sufficient attention and to let him orate to his fill without interrupting him. In the time of our youth he sang the praises of a certain “interlocutor,” deferential and silent as he could wish, who drank in his words and was satisfied to indicate his astonishment by looks; he found him anew every day at the same hour on the platform of the omnibus. This stranger intrigued me. I became jealous of him. Who could he be?… Checking up finally enabled me to discover that he was the swimming teacher from the Rochechouart swimming pool.
Mathematics and algebra filled his mind; not at first geometry, for which, at the beginning, he showed a determined lack of understanding: “When, for the first time, in class, I heard the professor say: ‘Let us take the triangle ABC and transpose it onto the triangle A’B’C’,’ my mind refused to follow.”1 What could that mean? Useless to continue: I don’t get it. It will be for others to judge whether this conclusion about geometry is admissible, and I doubt that Valéry would have been able to sustain it, while pursuing intrepidly, on the other hand, the study of astronomy, for instance. He lent to Lobatchewsky, Maxwell and Riemann an attention he refused to literary works. During a stay at La Roque, where he had had the great pleasure of finding on his night-table the writings of Maxwell, that I had had the pleasure of getting to offer him, he took from my library one evening the two volumes of Martin Chuzzlewit by Dickens, that he returned to me the next morning, having passed a part of the night, he said, in reading them.
“What! Completely?” I exclaimed.
“Oh!.. sufficiently. I acquainted myself with his processes which are agreeable enough. I saw his starting point and his point of arrival. Between the two, there is just stuffing. A good secretary, having once grasped his method, could have worked it out about as well. The Fara da se does not interest me.”
He made quick work of assimilating the little nutritive matter in a book, and, as a rule, once he had seen “what it was driving at,” his curiosity passed on to something else. Even if he was enchanted, he didn’t care to linger. Ars non stagnat remained his devise; and, if he considered a work of art only in so far as the artist can do it over again at will, “why do again,” he thought, “what has already been perfected?” It was important to bring every enterprise to perfection at once, in order to be able to relinquish it immediately afterwards. That is the source of his accomplished works that were each one, turn by turn, his great poems, after he had gotten his hand in with the “exercises” of La Jeune Parque. Ceaselessly he went forward, adhering with modesty to the concealment of his gropings, his touching-up, his sketches, and letting his colleagues all about him lag behind rewriting unflaggingly the same verses, the same books, or, without progress, their equivalents.
So he held literature in rather profound contempt, especially the novel. The truth is, he was not interested in others, at least in their capacity as persons; for he refused to feel.… I was going to say sympathy, but I would not like that word to be misunderstood and to have it thought that I mean he was incapable of loving; no, but rather he disliked another’s thought or emotion, to encroach on his own domain by contagion. Was it not in this sense that La Rochefoucauld could write: “I am not very susceptible to pity, and I wish I were not so at all?”
Consequently, his admirations in the field of letters were rare, and more and more grudging, quickly reduced or passed by. That which he professed in the beginning of his career for Stendhal, for instance, I was astonished to see him, at the latter part of his life, smile at; he then claimed, paradoxically, to prefer Restif de la Bretonne or Casanova to him. Besides, he read very little,1 feeling no need to call upon others in order to think.
Nevertheless, I think that his cult remained intact for Mallarmé, whom he considered a master and his predecessor on the arduous road along which he was to follow him, but only to bypass him soon, it seems to me. Besides, Valéry remained one of the most faithful of friends: “I am in love with friendship,” he might have said with Montesquieu. In spite of his anti-semitism, so tender of heart and so sensitive — his intimate friends had many proofs of it — but also of such reticence that he would doubtless reproach me for speaking of it. This cynic was capable of attentions and exquisite courtesies with his relations and those to whom he was attached. Now that he is no more, I would dare to relate the following: a short time after the death of Mallarmé, he came to me saying: “There is talk of a monument they propose to erect. The list of subscribers will appear, as is proper, in the papers. However, Mallarme is leaving a widow and a daughter in that apartment where we went so often and whose rent is still due; well? No one is worrying about that. I am not in a position to assume that responsibility all alone. I thought you would help me perhaps … but, don’t tell anyone, will you?”
Financial worries dogged him all his life. He was always afraid of being short; this, added to his desire to oblige, kept him hiding from incessant demands, solicitations, requests. From this resulted his talks, his numerous prefaces: “One seems either not to understand or not to believe — and yet I have said it often enough — that my work is made up for the greatest part only of responses to demands or chance circumstances, and that without those solicitations or external necessities, it would not exist,” he might write. The excess of obligations he allowed to be imposed upon him wore him out; he would have liked to throw up the game, ask mercy: “All these charming people will kill me,” he said. “Do you know the epigraph that will have to be engraven on my tomb? — Here lies Paul Valéry killed by others.” But one is forced to recognize that a number of his best pages were born thus of a provocation. Besides, nothing he wrote could be neglected. Drawing on a reserve pile, he scattered his treasures about in sparks. At any rate his writings, of a rare quality, were addressed only to a restricted public. His books were never best sellers. Their teaching could be understood only by the elite; and it was not even desirable that it be followed by a great number; for, like Nietzsche’s, it is in danger of destroying those whom it does not strengthen.