VALERY IN LOVE

On the night of 4-5 October, 1892, in Genoa, 

Paul Valéry swore that never would he love anyone, at least not like that, the first time in Montpellier, when he was just a lad turning eighteen, and fell under the bewitchment of a "gracieuse Montpelliéraine".

Madame de Rovira was a Catalan widow, 37 years old. Valery called her 'la petite comtesse", though she was really a baroness. When he saw her for the first time, in the summer of 1889, it was like falling in love with the Sylvie of Gerard de Nerval or the Châteaubriand's sylph suddenly reincarnated in Madame de Rovira. Totally spellbound and desperate, he asked his friend Pierre Louys for advice. Louys, despite being as young as Valéry, was already an erotomaniac, taking photos of all his lovers in the nude with his Kodak. However, the virgin Valéry rather loved the "chimeric", the "imaginary" of the woman, not her tangible voluptuousness.

This infatuation was a disaster for his emotional and mental stability: 

"I've lost my beautiful and pristine vision of the world. I am an exile of myself." "I made myself an enemy of the Tender with all the strengths of my desperate tenderness."

That's why on that night, in Genoa, he made the decision to renounce love forever. A classic romantic night with a thunderstorm and flash of lightning. After all, he'd only loved a ghost, and "plus beaux sont nos fantômes que nous mêmes".

*

Yet, in the winter of 1938, Valery fell madly in love afresh, this time not with a chimaera or "fantôme" but a tangible, voluptuous woman. He was 67 years old, already a renowned poet and bourgeois-wise happy, married with children and grandchildren. Jeanne Voilier, by contrast, was 34, single, a successful lawyer, a business woman and an average novelist. Valery hadn't written a line of poetry for nearly twenty years and felt himself exhausted, finished, smoking 60 fags a day with excruciating stomach pains relieved with bismuth and belladonna, struggling with insomnia and addiction to opium. 

Jeanne Voilier, namely, became another drug to wind down his ailments with her legs of walkyrie and rubenesque hips and "a rose that is also a ruby hidden between her wide-open thighs". A lustful addiction that lasted until the last leg of his life, when he hardly could gather strength to write verses, thoughts in school notebooks under the title "Sub signo doloris". Even so, he had sufficient time to morph Jeanne Voilier into Lust, "la demoiselle de cristal", in his play Mon Faust.

From a steadfast misogynist and "enemy of the tender", Paul Valery turned into an old man with an infinite need of tenderness. He referred to Jeanne as "mon harmonique tendre" or "ma petite connette cherie". From not writing a single line in years to suddenly churning out more than 150 poems for Jeanne. The "Eros énergumène" had seized hold of him. His obsession with Jeanne Voilier went so overboard that he ended up suggesting they could write an epistolary novel together, where Valery would be the female character, that is, the heroine (perhaps the "belle dame sans merci"). What a magnificent irony: a stalwart misogynist who hated the novel as a literary genre, winding up as a heroine in a kind of sentimental roman. 

Valery passed away, in love, on 20 July, 1945. Curiously, a furious thunderstorm with lightning also resounded all over Paris. Doctor Gutmann, who was beside his bed, assured that he saw the last and powerful breath of the poet arising to Heaven... or maybe to Hell.