Paul Valéry : Autobiography

(Sète 1871 - Paris 1945)

Paul Valéry

Moi

Autobiography

I WAS BORN at Cette [Sète] on October 30, 1871.

My father, a native of Bastia, was a customs official there.

I have few or no memories of my earliest childhood. But the pageant of a seaport, things belonging to the sea, the boats below our windows were food for my eyes in my early

years, after which we see nothing except by effort.

As a I child I lived in imagination. Horror of violent games.I began to read fairly early.

I was very impressionable. My sensitivity caused me to suffer cruelly. Childhood terrors.

In 1878 I was enrolled in the town grammar school (after attending various small schools).

The location of this school was remarkable. Halfway up St. Clair "Mountain" (180 meters in altitude) on which the town is built, overlooking the port. The playgrounds were terraces, one above the other, from which the sea and the comings and goings of ships were in view.

I suffered in leaving all this, in 1884 when we went to live in Montpellier. There, the playgrounds were like wells. The classes at Cette were so small that I necessarily stood

high. I was first out of four without much effort. When I was twelve, I was seized with a passionate desire to be a sailor. The visits of the fleet drove me out of my mind. I suffered

from this intense love as one suffers from love. But my father did not look favorably on my imagined vocation, and, besides, I did not understand the first thing about mathematics.

Montpellier, in 1884.

The lycee had the dreariest possible effect on me. I felt lost in the corridors of the third form. No personal relations with my teachers. The few efforts I put forth produced very meagre results. Boredom overwhelmed me. I was a very mediocre student and remained so to the end of my studies.

To me, the teaching seemed completely uninspired and repugnant, and in short nothing more than coercion. The simple and foolish idea of the baccalaureate dominate everything. The baccalaureate: a bogey and an expedient.

Little by little I made an "inner life" for myself. I read a great deal of Hugo and Gautier. We begin with the picturesque and the romantic.

In the second form, this predilection became more specific. I fell in love with Architecture, to the point of setting out to read Viollet-le-Duc. I took the notion of making a resume of the great dictionary — which I began, even copying the illustrations, but gave up before finishing the letter A.

The following year, 1887, my father died and was buried at Cette in the cemetery which I called "Le Cimetiere marin" [The Cemetery by the Sea].I passed the baccalaureate examinations despite my professor's predictions. Passed philosophy also and entered

law school in 1888.

I began the study of law as many others have done, without having the vaguest notion of what I wanted to do. I wrote a few poems.

Our student life was very easy. We passed our time in conversation, walks, a few classes, after which we held forth in the beautiful gardens of Montpellier or at a cafe. All sorts of odd things began to interest me — even anthropology. I measured skulls! But it was only in the following year that literature took deeper hold of me. In September of '89 I read Huysmans' A Rebours, which made a tremendous impression on me. It was a manual of art and the most "advanced" literature of the time. The names of Verlaine, Mallarme, and Villiers appeared there with quotations from their work. The literary fever made astonishing progress in me in those two weeks.

Then in November, when I was barely eighteen, I volunteered for military service to profit by the law of 1873 which had just been replaced by the law of 1889. I was refused the deferment I had hoped for, and joined the 122nd infantry regiment to begin my year of military service. A very hard year for a very young and very frail volunteer. I was of a nervous temperament. No muscles. I do not know how I stood it. We were subject to a mechanical regime in the intensive use of weapons. Boredom and constant pressure. Nothing to feed the mind. Corporals were being created, not officers. The initial good will of the sixty-nine volunteers changcd to loathing for the profession.

On Sundays I shut myself up at home, and as a reaction against the stupidity of the week I wrote poetry. That period of my life has affected me deeply. I recall that, in order to protcct myself against that lethal boredom, I trained myself during the long marches or during hours of guard duty to imagine with all my powers other scenes and landscapes, completely different conditions — imagined so precisely that I was able to create for myself another life to mask the deadly reality.

In the month of May 1890, the celebration of the sixth centenary of the University (1290-1890), four days of leave. On the fourth day, by pure chance, I made the acquaintance

of Pierre Louys. A capital event. An encounter at a cafe. A correspondence began between us, an intense exchange of likings and desires.

Pierre was already deeply involved in the movement. From him I learned what was going on. He founded a little review, La Conque, and induced me to send him some poems. My first poem, " Narcisse parle," had a success that astonished me. Unexpectedly, Chantavoine praised it in the Journal des Débats.

I was then in my second year of law. My law studies suffered as a result of my preoccupation with poetry. I met Andre Gide, who sent me Mallarme's poems, then impossible to find in the provinces. And I discovered Rimbaud. These two poets had a most powerful influence on me. Moreover, they made me despair — one for his perfection the other for his intensity. I thought I had seen the limits of the art of expression.

On the other hand, I read a great deal of Poe, in whom I found a scientific bent, a taste for precision, rigor, and reasoning that joined forces with my old love of Architecture. 1 felt developing in me a sort of will toward an intellectual art, premeditated works requiring the presence of all the faculties of the mind. I posed to myself many questions about aesthetics, and gave great importance to reflections on Ornament.

At the same time I became acquainted with Music, that is I saw operating in me the liaison between music — an art I knew nothing about beyond simple works and popular operas — and my own preoccupations. Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and the prelude to Lohengrin sent me into transports. Wagner's great influence on me dates from that period.

Those few months of 1891 were for me very full ones. I changed visibly. I went to Paris in the month of October. Pierre Louys took me to see Mallarme. I returned home for my third year of law. All the preceding themes were aggravated. I could write poetry only with great difficulty. A love affair finished me. Finally, having taken my law degree — and just barely — I went to spend a month in Italy, where I suffered an acute mental martyrdom. Despair in every direction. Extra-lucid nights.

And I passed through my inner 18 Brumaire which led to the advent of "Mr. Teste".

(...)

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