1871

30 October, birth at Sète of Paul Valéry, second son of Barthélémy Valerj and Fanny Grassi; his father was of Corsican origin, his mother Italian.

1878

First visit to London, when the family stay with his mother's elder sister Pauline de Rin.

In October, following two years at the Dominican school, Valéry moves to the Collège de Sète.

I must have been about nine or ten years old when I began to make for myself an island of my mind, and although fairly sociable and communicative by nature, I increasingly kept a secret garden for myself where I cultivated the images that seemed entirely my own, could only belong to me. (Œ, I, 14.)

1884-8

The family moves to Montpellier, where Valéry continues his education at the lycée.

I was an extremely mediocre pupil. It cost me Greek and a lot of Latin, not to mention mathematics! My teachers (all except one) taught only by force.

Later this compelled me to act like Robinson Crusoe. (ego. XXIV, 510.)

First poetic writing.

Death of his father in March 1887.

He reads avidly Hugo, Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine and discovers in the Musée Fabre the Dictionnaire de l'Architecture of Viollet-le-Duc and Owen Jones' The Grammar of Ornament. He begins to draw and paint. His friend Pierre Féline introduces him to mathematics and music, and especially the music of Wagner

1888

Enrolment in the Faculty of Law at Montpellier.

1889

First poem published.

This had a profound effect on me — My name in print induced an impression similar to that experienced in dreams where you are deeply mortified to discover yourself stark naked in an elegant drawing-room — (ego scriptor. XXVII, 683-686.)

Reading of Flaubert, Mallarmé, Huysmans and Poe. Military service. First sight of Mme de Rovira and beginning of the emotional crisis that comes to a head in 1891-2.

1890

Friendship with Pierre Louÿs and André Gide.

1891

Publication of 'Narcisse parle' in La Conque.

Autumn: visit to Paris and first meeting with Mallarmé.

1892

4-5 October: 'nuit de Gênes'

Memories — Crises / What happened in Genoa in '92 — Lightning — bedroom visited by the flashes of lightning. / What happened in Nice in '21. (ego. XIII, 20.)

My analytics of 1892, product of 'self consciousness' applied to the destruction of obsessions and poisons […] A struggle with the devils. […]

And all this led me to my 'Method' — which was purity — separation of domains. j and y. Attempt to isolate these factors of a given a state. (ego XXIII, 757-760.)

It is at once an intellectual awakening, an emotional crisis, a reaction of despair provoked by the unmatchable perfection of the works of others and the radical destruction of the idols of his youth. Henceforth, Valéry holds to a permanently determining form of analytical and critical reflexivity and a preference for pure potentiality over performance.

November: With his mother and brother, Valéry spends several months in Paris where he becomes intensely involved in the intellectual life of the capital.

1893

Beginning of scientific readings: Faraday, Maxwell, Lord Kelvin — and subsequently Riemann, Lobatchevsky, Russel, Cantor, Poincaré.

Friendship with Marcel Schwob who introduced Valéry to a number of English writers, including R.L. Stevenson, Defoe, Meredith and Poe.

1894

Valéry moved to Paris, into a small, sparsely-furnished room in the rue Gay-Lussac.

Readings in the Bibliothèque nationale include consultation of the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.

June: Visit to London where he stays with his aunt in Highbury Crescent. He goes for long walks in the City, sees Irving play Faust at the Lyceum, meets writers and artists associated with The Yellow Book, including Edmund Gosse and Aubrey Beardsley and pays a visit to George Meredith. He also meets up with editors associated with the Pall Mall Gazette.

Valéry begins in this year to write the series of Cahiers, the notebooks written in the early hours of every morning for the following 51 years.

A regular visitor to Mallarmé's Tuesday evenings, he becomes deeply involved in the literary and artistic life of Paris.

1895

March: death of Berthe Morisot, whose work Valéry greatly admired.

June: Valéry passes the competition to become a secretary at the Ministry of War (though does not take up the position until 1897).

August: publication of the Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci.

1896

March/April: work in London as a translator for Cecil Rhodes' Charted Company. Valéry is intrigued by the operation of political power and, through his contacts with W.E. Henley and Charles Whibley, is caught up in the imperialistic ambitions of the Pall Mall Gazette.

The famous men alive today whom I personally admire are Messrs. H. Poincaré, Lord Kelvin, S. Mallarmé, J.-K. Huysmans, E. Degas, and perhaps Mr. Cecil Rhodes. That makes 6 names. (ego. I, 116.)

December: publication of 'La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste' in the journal Le Centaure; Degas, whom Valéry recently met, refuses the dedication.

1897

January: publication in the New Review of the article 'Une Conquête allemande' commissioned the previous year by Henley (subsequently entitled 'Une Conquête méthodique').

1898

January: publication of a review-article on Michel Bréal's La Sémantique.

July: last visit to Mallarmé at Valvins.

Mallarmé said to me at Valvins yesterday (14 July '98): the corn — it's like the first clash of autumn's cymbals over the earth. (poetry. I, 253.)

The death of Mallarmé on 9 September, is a profound personal loss to Valéry, in both emotional and intellectual terms.

December: meeting, through Degas, with Julie Manet, the daughter of Berthe Morisot, and her cousins Paule and Jeannie Gobillard.

1900

31 May: Marriage of Paul Valéry and Jeannie Gobillard, celebrated together with that of Julie Manet and Ernest Rouart.

July: Valéry leaves the Ministry of War to become private secretary of Edouard Lebey, a senior director in the Agence Havas, who is paralysed. For more than 20 years Valéry spends three or four hours a day with him, thus leaving ample time for his own work; the duties undertaken include acting as intermediary between Lebey and the company, keeping him abreast of economic and political developments, but also reading to him from the vast library.

I am attempting at my own risk and peril, what Faraday attempted and accomplished in physics, what Riemann did in mathematics — Pasteur in biology — and others in music. I am attempting to furnish the theory of consciousness with a method that is sufficiently rigorous to restrict the number of ghosts it contains and to bring its practical disciplines, which have always existed apart from the theories, into a closer relationship. (system. 1900-1901. II, 102.)

1902

Paul and Jeannie Valéry move to 40 rue de Villejust (now rue Paul Valéry), a house built 20 years previously by Berthe Morisot and her husband Eugène Manet, the brother of Edouard. They occupy one floor and share their apartment with Jeannie's sister Paule. Soon there are children too, Claude (1903), Agathe (1906) and François (1916). Valéry has one tiny room to use as a study.

For the next ten years or so, the work on the Cahiers continues, through phases of considerable abstraction, moving from the hope of a mathematically expressed model of mental functioning that was his 'System of 1892', towards what he calls 'my method', a set of perspectives and procedures that make up his own 'way of looking', his own 'system for thinking'. The themes of 'Attention', 'Memory', 'Surprise', 'Language', 'Time', 'Dream-Sleep', while seemingly abstract, become vast reservoirs of developing insights ready to infuse the later writing.

But it is not a period of 'Silence' as is sometimes claimed: poems are republished, La Soirée avec M. Teste appears in a special edition, a 'Mémoire sur l'attention' is begun, notes on sleep and dream published in the N.R.F. In 1908 he begins to classify the Notebooks of which there are now 45; passages are copied, and then typed using his newly purchased 'Oliver' typewriter and distributed among different coloured folders. There are also periods of close contact with Pierre Louÿs and Degas; visits to Monet and to Renoir, meetings with Ravel and later friendship with Odilon Redon, as well as frequent attendance at concerts of music by Debussy, Gluck, Monteverdi and recitals at the piano of Jeannie Valéry.

1913-1917

Following an invitation to republish earlier verse, Valéry begins work on La Jeune Parque which was published in April 1917.

How I composed La J[eune] P[arque] / I thought of Gluck. I played with two fingers. Contrary to Lulli at the Th[éâtre] Français, I put notes to the dream of A[thalie] —

I imagined a melody, attempted to delay, to create ritardandos, to link, to cut, to intervene — to conclude, to resolve — doing this in relation to meaning as well as sound. […] (ego scriptor. VI, 508-509.)

The review of the poem in the Times Literary Supplement in August 1917 by John Middleton Murry is considered by Valéry to show particularly acute understanding and insight (it leads to a substantial correspondence between them, maintained sporadically over many years). The review launches Valéry in the Anglophone world with which he will come into increasing contact in the 1920s — including T.S. Eliot, the poet and critic Thomas Sturge Moore, the poet Robert Trevelyan.

I feel quite clearly this evening — it's 10.20 p.m. — that this state of mind will not return — that I will not write again what I have written.

Before La J[eune] P[arque] I felt myself becoming the instrument — —

Et nunc, I feel myself to be the instrument. (ego scriptor. 1917. VI, 752.)

1919

Publication by Gallimard of La Soirée and Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci followed by Note et digression.

1920

Publication of 'Le Cimetière marin' and Album de vers anciens.

June: first encounter with Catherine Pozzi.

If I look at myself historically I find two formidable events in my secret life. A coup d'état in '92 and something immense, unlimited, incommensurable, in 1920.

I cast a thunderbolt upon what I was in '92. 28 years later, it fell upon me, — from your lips. (eros. VIII, 762.)

1921

Eupalinos ou l'Architecte, written to command for the journal Architecture.

December: L'Ame et la Danse published in the Revue musicale.

1922

June: Charmes

October: Visit to London to inaugurate a commemorative plaque on the house where Verlaine had lived. Valéry gives a talk at the residence of Lady Colfax (the audience including Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, Edmund Gosse, George Moore, Arnold Bennett, Harold Nicolson, Vita Sackville West).

Meeting with Joseph Conrad who is eager to see Valéry after having read Charmes.

1923

Lectures in Brussels on Pure poetry and on Baudelaire, at the Vieux-Colombier in Paris and in London where he speaks at the Institut Français. He stays at a house in Holland Park where Ravel is also staying. Valéry spends a day in Kent visiting Conrad with whom he has a long 'maritime discussion'.

1924

Appointed President of the French Pen Club (until 1934).

Publication of Variété and of a facsimile edition of the notes of Cahier B 1910.

Lecture tours in France, Belgium, Italy (where he meets D'Annunzio) and Spain (where he meets Ortega y Gasset), and a visit to Rilke in Switzerland.

1925

Member of the Committee for Arts and Letters of the League of Nations.

1926

Publication in December of XV Lettres de Paul Valéry à Pierre Louÿs, the latter having died the previous year.

They sell my letters in public — and I find them in catalogues, reproduced, — very personal letters.[…] Treated with the same honours, and the same lack of consideration, that is customary for the dead. […] That's the price of fame. (ego. XII, 70)

Rhumbs, Fragments du Narcisse, Monsieur Teste

1927

June: Elected to the Académie Française.

October: Travel to England: visits to London, Oxford, Cambridge.

In the succeeding years the publication of Variété II-V, Moralités, Regards sur le monde actuel, L'Idée Fixe will follow; but while the lecture tours across Europe intensify and the meetings with leading contemporary figures in the arts, sciences and politics multiply, the roles of public figure and professional writer are in competition with the precious time for thinking and writing the Notebooks.

'My works' — i.e. what I have written and published — are not at all what I feel to be my work — what is really my own.

The latter is simply what has depended on me alone — and not in the least inspired or influenced by circumstances at odds with my own desires.

This work that is purely mine, boils down to some poems, some fragments — and then — but above all, — to my ideas more or less noted down, to observations, to points of view and the system underlying them, to the will and the sensibility which these products suppose. (ego scriptor. XXVI, 500.)

1931

Awarded Honorary Doctorate at the University of Oxford.

June: first performance of Amphion at the Opéra, with music by Honegger, choreography by Ida Rubinstein

Pièces sur l'Art, Moralités, Regards sur le monde actuel

1932

Discours en l'honneur de Goethe, delivered at the Sorbonne.

L'Idée Fixe

1933

May: visit to Spain with the Committee for Arts and Letters of the League of Nations, for a series of discussions on 'The Future of Culture', chaired by Marie Curie; from 1936-1939 he presides over this committee.

During this hectic year, which includes lectures in Brussels, Marseilles, San-Remo, Barcelona, Genoa, Florence, Rome and Naples, he writes to his brother:

As for me, I have a speech to give tomorrow that I haven't begun, as usual three or four prefaces to write — including one for Sir James Frazer — my Sémiramis that is going into stage preparation, which I expect to be an extremely laborious process, — a lecture for the Annales in November, a book on Degas I'm completing… plus all the things I've forgotten, not to mention the vast correspondence. (Letter to Jules Valéry. Œ, I, 59-60.)

In a Notebook of the time, he recalls suddenly feeling in the midst of a social gathering

a mad desire to reason, to conceptualise — to abolish through thoughts — this festive gathering.

I have my intellectual 'Schizophrenia' — for I am as 'sociable' and easy-going on the surface as I am separatist and singularist deep-down.

I find it hard to understand this double leaning: one towards everybody; the other towards the solitary, and a very absolute form of solitude. (ego. XVI, 459.)

December: appointed Director of the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen, Nice.

1934

First performance of Sémiramis, with music by Honegger.

November: visit to London, during which he sees a performance of Hamlet:

Here the famous question of interpretation arises. I come down on the side of the verse: the author's intention has no more value than that of any reader — since his authorial power expires with the work, which should prevail over everything. (Personal note. Œ, I, 61.)

1935

He is told of Bergson's remark about him:

'What Valéry has done, had to be attempted.'

This honourable line — I'll retain it. It's a motto.. My 'necessity' — and my definition too. (ego. XVII, 792.)

1936

Degas Danse Dessin

1937

Elected to the Chair of Poetics at the Collège de France; his lectures, the first of which is delivered on 10 December 1937, continue until the final year of his life.

1938

Cantate du Narcisse written over the summer.

1939

September: meetings at the house of Nadia Boulanger with Stravinsky before his departure for the USA.

1940

At a time of great anxiety, concern for his family and severe emotional crisis, two Acts of 'Mon Faust' are written; though partially performed over the following years, the work, which remains unfinished, will occupy Valéry until his death.

1941

Speech in honour of Bergson at the Académie Française, recognized as an act of courage under the Occupation.

Valéry is relieved of his responsibilities at the Centre Méditerranéen.

Tel Quel

1942

Mauvaises pensées et autres

1943

Despite a significant deterioration in his health, Valéry continues his lectures at the Collège de France.

Dialogue de l'Arbre, Tel Quel II

1944

August: Valéry reads 'Mon Faust' at the home of Mme Jean Voilier, with whom he has been emotionally involved since 1937.

Valéry participates in celebrating the liberation of Paris and is invited to meet de Gaulle.

December: performance of Cantate du Narcisse, with music by Germaine Tailleferre.

1945

April: performance of 'Le Solitaire' at the Comédie Française.

May: final Notebook is begun, entitled Sub signo doloris

I have the feeling that my life is completed — i.e. I can see nothing at present that requires a following day. What remains for me to live can from now on be only time to waste. After all, I've done what I could. I know

1. my mind sufficiently. —

I believe that what I have found that's important — I am sure of this value — will not be easy to decipher from my notes — — Never mind —

2. I know, too, my heart. It triumphs. Stronger than everything, than mind, than organism. — That is the fact... The most obscure of facts. Stronger than the will-to-live and the ability-to-understand is therefore this damn, sacred — H — — […] (affectivity. XXIX, 908-909.)

20 July: death of Valéry

24/25 July: State funeral

27 July : burial in the family grave in the cemetery by the sea at Sète.