THE TROMBINOSCOPE
VALÉRY (Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules) — if a first name is missing, his descendants will not fail to send it to us — writer and poet born on October 30, 1871 in Sète. The life of the author of Le Cimetière marin could have been cut short. While his nurse was flirting on a bench in the public garden of the green castle, the 3-year-old cherub almost drowned in the Neptune basin. He then knew how to channel his “craziness for water” through drawings and watercolors of the port while dreaming of a maritime career. Paul Valéry began his studies with the Dominicans, then at the college of Sète and the high school of Montpellier.
His first verses were naturally published by the Revue maritime de Marseille when he had just enrolled in 1889 at the Faculty of Law in Montpellier after having given up preparing for the Naval School.
It was in his other home port, in Genoa, that Paul Valéry fell victim, on the night of October 4 to 5, 1892, to an intellectual epiphany. An existential and sentimental crisis at the origin of his notebooks of the mind, in which he prosaically lays the groundwork for a semblance of a work, soberly devoted to reflection and ideas. He often indicated that he considered that night spent in Genoa as his true birth.
His genoiseries inaugurated a life of inveterate thinker and silenced his poetic voice for nearly twenty years. He plunges his reflections, written in the early hours of the day, into no less than 258 notebooks which will not be published until after his death. The evolution of his consciousness and his relationship to time, dreams and language, will be recorded daily and illustrated with drawings and watercolors. He will admit that "the same questions for 43 years graze the near of [his] brain".
A throw of the dice never abolishing chance, it was during a banquet in Palavas in 1890 that Valéry established his first relationship as a writer. There he met Pierre Louÿs, symbolist poet, who put him in touch with André Gide, whom Valéry would meet the same year. An epistolary acquaintance will be established with Stéphane Mallarmé, to whom he asks advice. "Only gives it solitude", replies the master of the poetic avant-garde.
Rejected by this exhilarating precept, Paul Valéry married Jeannie Gobillard in 1900, with whom he would have three children. "The whole family was painting." He painted inside, he painted outside, he painted everywhere and at any time. It was scary! Said Agathe, the poet's daughter. This family was founded by the Valéry couple, Jeannie's sister, Paule Gobillard, and their cousin Julie Manet. An entire artistic tribe living in a building with walls lined with paintings and built by the parents of Julie, Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet, brother of Édouard Manet.
It was not until 1917 that Valéry, under the influence of Gide in particular, fell in love again with the poetic muse. With the publication of La Jeune Parque, whose immediate success announced that of the other great poems: Le Cimetière marin in 1920 and the poetic collections, brought together in Charmes, in 1922, influenced by Mallarmé. On the Marine Cemetery, he said: “it's about the only poem where I put something in my life”. In his poetry, the author always favored formal mastery over meaning and inspiration. “My verses have the meaning we attribute to them”, a choice which is expressed in particular in this tercet:
This hand, on my features that it dreams of touching
Distractedly docile to some deep end,
Awaits from my weakness a tear that melts.
In the last line, the verb used gave rise to a feverish controversy over its nature: to found or to melt. Two brotherhoods therefore clashed: the fondards and the fondards. A hundred years later, the abyss remains. At the same time, two other communities opposed each other, the Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards. A nationalist childhood had made him choose the camp of the latter. Fortunately, refusing to collaborate with the occupier, he joined later that of the first. The high point will remain a eulogy by Henri Bergson, a speech which was hailed as an act of courage and resistance. Ironically, as the Pétain trial opened in liberated France, the bard switched the harp to the left.
His finger on the seam of the academician's coat will make him write, dubiously in front of a painting by Picasso: “there is something certainly new in this art. But what ? ". He was just as indifferent to Bonnard and Matisse. But he also abhorred the philosopher and the politician among his contemporaries, considering the former “more a skilful sophist, handler of concepts, than a craftsman in the service of Knowledge like the scientist”. As for the second, he offered this dazzling intuition about politics: “the art of preventing people from getting involved in what concerns them”. A premonition that gives this classic a striking modernity, having sensed the shortcomings and excesses of our time.
Paul Valéry will be entitled to a national funeral, the first for a writer since Victor Hugo. The ceremony takes place at the Palais de Chaillot, the theater of which will be directed a few years later by Jean Vilar. The pediment of the Trocadero Palace bore four inscriptions in golden letters by an author who had become essential after his 1919 text on the future of European civilization. These quotations had been commissioned from him for the Universal Exhibition of 1937 and produced in a typeface, the Peignot, created jointly by the poster designer and typographic designer AM Cassandre. They have the particularity of being dotted with suspended dots between each word, a whim from Roman lapidary engraving. What flies stung the curator of the exhibition, to the point of seeing him punching the lines with a regularity that we only found at the entrances to the Paris metro?
Paris wing, City of Architecture and Heritage, towards the Eiffel Tower:
EVERYONE • MAN • CREATES • WITHOUT • KNOWLEDGE
HOW • HE • BREATHE
BUT • THE ARTIST • FEELS • CREATES
HIS • ACT • COMMITS • EVERYTHING • HIS • BEING
HIS • SORROW • BELOVED • THE • STRENGTHENS
Towards Place du Trocadéro:
IN • THESE • WALLS • DEDICATED • TO • WONDERS
I WELCOME • AND • KEEP • THE • WORKS
BY • THE • PRODIGIOUS • HAND • BY • THE ARTIST
EQUAL • AND • RIVAL • OF • HIS • THOUGHT
ONE • IS • NOTHING • WITHOUT • THE OTHER
Passy wing, Musée de l'Homme, towards the Eiffel Tower:
IT • DEPENDS • ON • THE • WHO • PASSES
WHETHER • I • AM • GRAVE • OR • TREASURE
WHETHER • I • SPEAK • OR • I • SHUT UP
THIS • IS • UP • TO • YOU
FRIEND • DO NOT • ENTER • WITHOUT • DESIRE
Towards Place du Trocadéro:
THINGS • RARE • OR • THINGS • BEAUTIFUL
HERE • SKILLS • ASSEMBLIES
INSTRUCT • THE EYE • TO • LOOK
LIKE • NEVER • AGAIN • VIEWS
ALL • THINGS • THAT • ARE • IN • THE WORLD
This evening of July 1945, two projectors at the foot of the Eiffel Tower deployed by their beams an immense and majestic V in the sky. The initial of Valéry mixed with the V for victory offered the day after the liberation a luminous national symbol of the resistance of arms and letters to Nazism. Commander of the Legion of Honor, Valéry received military honours. A gathered crowd filed past the coffin placed on a tricolor catafalque and watched over by students. The ceremony ended in Sète, three days later, with the burial of the poet in the family vault of the Saint-Charles cemetery, which will take the name of Marin cemetery shortly after. The epitaph will be found in the poem that made the necropolis facing the sea famous:
O Reward after a thought
Only a long look at the calm of the gods.
Impatient to remind our good memories of her dear academician, our city, the pedant, rolled up her sleeves. His birthplace having been reduced, like a snub to memory, to rubble, she hastened to rename a street leading up to the college where he studied and became Lycée Paul Valéry. Its cemetery overlooking the Big Blue was renamed with great pomp as soon as the vault was closed. Finally, overseeing this one, an eponymous museum was inaugurated on the occasion of its centenary to house a fund from a grateful widow. To this day, Mont Saint-Clair should keep its surname, to the fury of the promoters of a southern Mont Valéryen. The good master thus exceeds the author of the Supplication by a short head to be buried on the beach of Sète which has only one street, a dyke, a museum space and a nomadic room...
Paul Valéry died at the age of 73 on July 20, 1945 in Paris, at 40 rue de Villejust, a few weeks after the end of the Second World War. A lapidary inscription sums up, on its own and in four lines, the venerable existence of the man of letters. If its author remains anonymous to this day, it nevertheless dominates, with its insolent clarity, the Quai de la Marine that as a child, Paul Valéry sketched with the stroke of a pencil. Passers-by today can read there, in a refined language and a form echoing the famous staircase of the Caravelle de Gêne where, in this park, a young Valéry liked to gamble rather than frolic:
HERE
WAS BORN
PAUL VALÉRY
OCTOBER 30, 1871
