“In public life, once a person has constructed his character and hears its echo, he plays the character, or rather the character plays him.”
About Paul Valéry
30 October 1871–20 July 1945
In the autumn of 1871, as France was still reeling from the trauma of the Franco-Prussian War and the violent suppression of the Paris Commune, a child was born in the Mediterranean port town of Sète who would become one of the twentieth century's most formidable literary intellects. Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules…