As a law student in Montpellier, Valéry published poems and befriended such influential authors as André Gide and Stéphane Mallarmé. As a result of a personal crisis in 1892, he resolved to abandon literature and devote himself to his autodidactical pursuit of knowledge. While serving in the Ministry of War, and then as private secretary to a powerful businessman, Valéry found time to read and write. In 1894 he began the first of some 261 notebooks in which he developed his matinal reflections for over fifty years. At Gide's instigation Valéry began to prepare a volume of poems, and ended up writing La jeune parque (The young fate) (1917), a hermetic allegory of consciousness that established him as an eminent French poet. In 1927 Valéry was elected as a member of the French Academy. He went on to...