Abstract
In addition to the " avant-dire " (drafts and preparatory essays) of the Cours de poétique, and notes taken by the public, including a few shorthand transcriptions, the editor of the Cours found in the immense Valéry collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France the Cahiers (de pensées) that Valéry had been writing since 1894, and which he began to classify and type from the years 1920 onwards. He set up a system of cross-references, in the form of coded signs, between the notes in the Cahiers, and copied the most significant of them onto loose sheets, which were then arranged thematically. All this material fed into Valéry's drafts and preparatory notes for the Cours de poétique, prior to the lessons.
Valéry, who had never taught until he entered the Collège de France at the age of 66 , was particularly concerned about the quality of his lectures. As a result, it was mainly the first lectures of the early years that were written in the form of fairly lengthy texts, which he dictated to a typist. These documents were not the lecture itself, but detailed preparatory notes, possibly supplemented by marginalia in Valéry's handwriting.
Among the various possible editions of such documents, we have chosen to offer readers a " final state ", i.e. an edition that gives as close as possible an account of what must have been said by Paul Valéry, while avoiding the marks of orality (tics of language, uninteresting epanorthoses, phatic discourse, etc.) and without the appearance of every word of the text. this edition, which emphasizes the intellectual dimension of the lecture, avoids the " sutures " and the editor's difficulties when confronted with partial indications, giving only the lesson number or the date. A search of the archives of the Collège de France revealed the registers signed by the professors before each lecture, making it possible to be certain of the number of lectures given and their respective numbers.
Just before the planned publication, a chance discovery in the Jacques-Doucet library yielded the transcripts of sixteen lessons from the final year (1945), as well as letters. Among the latter, a letter from Gaston Gallimard referred to the transcriptions of twelve lessons from the first year (1937). These were found in the Gallimard archives. As a result, the original edition of Les Cours was expanded by twenty-eight new lessons, representing an additional volume.
