Précocité de Valéry
One of 26 copies from the deluxe issue on vélin de Hollande, this copy hors commerce and nominative, for Madame Paul Valéry.
Signed presentation inscription: “Quel admirable destin, chère Madame ! filleule de Mallarmé, Monet, Degas, Renoir, épouse de Valéry et — secrètement — si grande vous-même, et, à chaque moment, parfaite. H. Mondor, Noël 1957.”
A leading surgeon and member of the Académie, Henri Mondor was also one of Valéry’s finest readers. This meticulously researched essay condenses his work on the poet’s formative years and, drawing on texts and documents, illuminates the early manifestations of Valéry’s poetic “laboratory” — a study still regarded by critics as a reliable synthesis.
A copy of exceptional interest given its recipient: it was presented to Madame Paul Valéry, née Jeannie Gobillard, niece of Berthe Morisot. An accomplished pianist, she was at the time attempting to enter the Conservatoire de Paris, which did not then admit women; she would finally succeed in 1899. When they met, Jeannie was twenty-one and Paul Valéry twenty-seven. Her encounter with the poet, already recognized as such, deeply moved her: “While I was playing La Lune [Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata], I felt that I was being listened to with love. He was, so to speak, inside the piano, at the tail of the piano, his back almost turned to me, but I could read his emotion there.” She concluded: “We were the same instrument. It only needed tuning.” She married Paul Valéry in 1900.