In addition to his poetry and fiction (drama and dialogues), his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events.

[1] Valéry was born to a Corsican father and Genoese-Istrian mother in Sète, a town on the Mediterranean coast of the Hérault, but he was raised in Montpellier, a larger urban center close by.

After a traditional Roman Catholic education, he studied law at university and then resided in Paris for most of the remainder of his life, where he was, for a while, part of the circle of Stéphane Mallarmé.

The wedding was a double ceremony in which the bride's cousin, Berthe Morisot's daughter, Julie Manet, married the painter Ernest Rouart.

On the night of 4 October 1892, during a heavy storm, Paul Valéry underwent an existential crisis, an event that made a huge impact on his writing career.

[9] This obscure, but sublimely musical, masterpiece, of 512 alexandrine lines in rhyming couplets, had taken him four years to complete, and it immediately secured his fame.

The title was chosen late in the poem's gestation; it refers to the youngest of the three Parcae (the minor Roman deities also called The Fates), though for some readers the connection with that mythological figure is tenuous and problematic.

The poem is written in the first person, and is the soliloquy of a young woman contemplating life and death, engagement and withdrawal, love and estrangement, in a setting dominated by the sea, the sky, stars, rocky cliffs, and the rising sun.

The poem is not about World War I, but it does try to address the relationships between destruction and beauty, and, in this sense, it resonates with ancient Greek meditations on these matters, especially in the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus.

Before la Jeune Parque, Valéry's only publications of note were dialogues, articles, some poems, and a study of Leonardo da Vinci.

[10] His far more ample prose writings, peppered with many aphorisms and bons mots, reveal a skeptical outlook on human nature, verging on the cynical.

[11] Although he had flirted with nationalist ideas during the 1890s, he moved away from them by 1899, and believed that European culture owed its greatness to the ethnic diversity and universalism of the Roman Empire.

"[14] Raymond Poincaré, Louis de Broglie, André Gide, Henri Bergson, and Albert Einstein[15] all respected Valéry's thinking and became friendly correspondents.

Valéry was often asked to write articles on topics not of his choosing; the resulting intellectual journalism was collected in five volumes titled Variétés.

[16] One of three epigraphs in Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian is from Valéry's Writing at the Yalu River (1895): "Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint.