Excerpt from Monsieur Teste — Paul Valéry (translated by Charlotte Mandell)

Preface (Note 1)

This imaginary character, whose author I became during a youth that was half-literary, half-unsociable or… inward, has gone on living, it seems, since that vanished time, with a certain life—with which his reticence, rather than his avowals, have led some readers to endow him.

Teste was begotten—in a room where Auguste Comte spent his early years—during an era when I was drunk on my own will, and subject to strange excesses of self-awareness.

I was afflicted with the acute disease of precision.  I was striving for the extreme of a mad desire to understand, and I was searching in myself for the critical points in my faculty of attention.

So I was doing whatever I could to increase a little the duration of certain thoughts.  Anything that was easy for me was uninteresting, almost my enemy.  The sensation of effort seemed to be what I needed to seek out, and I did not prize the fortunate results that are nothing but the natural fruits of our native abilities.  That is, results in general—consequently, the works themselves—mattered much less to me than the energy of their worker—the substance of things hoped for.  This proves that theology can be found pretty much everywhere. (Note 2)

I was suspicious of literature, even the rather precise work of poetry.  The act of writing always requires a certain “sacrifice of intellect.”  We are well aware, for example, that the conditions for reading literature are incompatible with any excessive precision of language.  The intellect would readily seek out perfections and purities of language that are not in the power of ordinary language.  But rare are the readers who only find enjoyment through straining the mind.  We win their attention only by dint of some amusement; and this kind of attention is passive.

It seemed unworthy to me, moreover, to divide my ambition between the desire to produce an effect on others and the passion of knowing and recognizing myself as I was, without omissions, without deception or complacency.

I rejected not only Literature, but also almost the whole of Philosophy, as belonging to the Vague and Impure Things I denied myself with all my heart.  Traditional speculative subjects aroused such annoyance in me that I was astonished at philosophers or at myself. I had not understood that the most elevated problems are rarely self-evident, and that they borrow much of their prestige and attraction from certain conventions one must know and accept in order to enter the ranks of philosophers.  Youth is a time during which conventions are, and must be, poorly understood:  either blindly fought against, or blindly obeyed.  In the early stages of the reflective life, one cannot conceive that only arbitrary decisions allow us to create anything:  language, societies, knowledge, works of art.  As for me, I had such a poor conception of this that I made it a rule to hold secretly as null or contemptible all the opinions and habits of mind that arise from living with others and from our external relations with other people, which vanish in voluntary solitude.  I could even think only with disgust of all the ideas and feelings engendered or stirred in humans merely by their ills and fears, their hopes and terrors, and not freely by their pure observations of things and themselves. 

I was trying, then, to reduce myself to my actual characteristics.  I had little confidence in my abilities, and I easily found in myself everything that was necessary to despise myself; but I was strong in my infinite desire for clarity, my scorn for convictions and idols, my disgust with ease, and my awareness of my limitations.  I had made for myself an inner island, and spent my time exploring and fortifying it…

Monsieur Teste was born one day from a recent memory of such states of mind.

In this way he resembles me as closely as a child, conceived by someone in a moment of profound change in his own being, resembles that father who has stepped outside himself.

It may happen, from time to time, that we abandon to life the exceptional creature of an exceptional moment.  It is not impossible, after all, that the singularity of certain individuals, their deviant qualities, good or bad, may sometimes be due to the momentary state of their conceivers.  It may be that instability is transmitted in this way and given free rein.  Besides, in matters of the mind, is this not the function of our works, the act of talent, the very object of our labors, and in brief, the essence of the bizarre instinct to make our rarest achievements outlive us?

Returning to Monsieur Teste, and observing that the existence of this kind of individual could not continue in reality for more than a few quarters of an hour, I posit that the problem of this existence and its duration is enough to give it a kind of life. The problem is a seed. A seed lives; but there are some that can never develop.  These try to live; they grow into monsters, and the monsters die.  In fact, we know them only by that remarkable characteristic of being unable to endure.  Abnormal are those beings who have a little less future than normal ones.  They are like all those thoughts that contain hidden contradictions.  They are produced in the mind, seem true and fertile, but their consequences ruin them, and their presence is soon fatal to themselves.  

—Who knows whether most of these tremendous thoughts over which so many great beings, and infinitely many lesser ones, have turned pale for centuries, are not psychological monsters—Monster Ideas—born from the naïve exercise of our questioning faculties, which we apply to almost everything, without realizing that we should reasonably question only what can actually answer us?

But monsters of the flesh soon perish.  Still, they have existed a little while.  Nothing is more instructive than to meditate on their fate.

Why is Monsieur Teste impossible? —This question is his very soul.  It changes you into Monsieur Teste.  For he is none other than the very demon of possibility.  Concern for all that he is capable of dominates him.  He observes himself, he manipulates, he does not allow himself to be manipulated.  He knows only two values, two categories, which are those of consciousness reduced to its deeds:  the possible and the impossible.  In that strange head, where philosophy has little credit, where language is always being indicted, there is scarcely any thought free of the sense that it is provisional; very little remains except expectation and the performance of definite actions.  Its brief, intense life is spent supervising the mechanism by which the relationships between the known and the unknown are instituted and regulated.  It even applies its obscure, transcendent powers to stubbornly simulating the properties of an isolated system where the infinite plays no part.

To give some idea of such a monster, to portray its appearances and its customs, to sketch at least a Hippogriff, a Chimera of intellectual mythology, demands—and hence excuses—the use, if not the creation, of a forced language, sometimes one that is vigorously abstract.  It must also have a certain familiarity and even a few traces of that vulgarity or triviality we allow ourselves.  We do not stand on ceremony with the one who is within us.

The text subjected to these very particular conditions is certainly none too easy to read in the original.  Which is all the more reason for it to present almost insurmountable difficulties to anyone who wants to carry it into a foreign language…

THE EVENING WITH MONSIEUR TESTE

Vita Cartesii est simplicissima… (Note 3)

Stupidity is not my strong suit.  I have seen many individuals; I have visited a few countries; I’ve played a part in various enterprises without liking them; I have eaten almost every day; I have been with women.  I recollect a few hundred faces, two or three epic events, and the substance of perhaps twenty books.  I have not retained the best or worst of these things: whatever could remain, has done so.

This arithmetic spares me from being surprised at growing old.  I could also add up the victorious moments of my mind, and imagine them collected and united, composing a happy life…  But I think I’ve always been a good judge of myself.  I have rarely lost sight of myself; I have hated myself, I have adored myself—and then we have grown old together.

Often I’ve supposed that everything was over for me, and that I was coming to an end with all my strength, anxious to exhaust or enlighten some painful situation.  This made me realize that we assess our own thinking too much in accordance with how others express theirs!  Thenceforth, the billions of words that buzzed in my ears rarely unsettled me by what people wanted them to mean; as to all those words I myself uttered to others, I always felt they were distinct from my thinking—for they became unchanging.

If I had made up my mind like most people, not only would I have thought myself their superior, but I would have appeared so.  I preferred myself.  What they call a superior being is a being who has deceived himself.  To be surprised by him, you must see him—and in order to be seen, he must show himself.  And he shows me that the simple-minded obsession with his name possesses him.  Thus, every great man is stained with a mistake.  Every mind we find powerful begins with the fault that makes him known.  In exchange for reward from the crowd, he gives the time that’s necessary to make himself conspicuous, the energy dissipated in conveying himself and procuring satisfaction from others.  He goes so far as to compare the amorphous games of fame to the joy of feeling unique—a voluptuous and private pleasure.

I dreamed then that the strongest minds, the wisest inventors, the most precise connoisseurs of thought, must be unknown people, frugal, people who die without divulging.  Their existence was revealed to me by the very existence of brilliant, slightly less solid individuals.

This conclusion was so easy that I could see it taking shape moment by moment.  It was enough to imagine great ordinary men who were pure of their initial error, or who drew support from that very error in order to conceive of a higher level of consciousness, a sense of the freedom of mind that was not so coarse.  Such a simple operation opened up curious expanses to me, as if I’d gone down into the sea.  I thought I could distinguish inner masterpieces lost in the glare of published discoveries, alongside little-known inventions that commerce, fear, boredom, poverty perpetrate every day.  I amused myself by burying known history beneath the annals of anonymity.  

Invisible in their lucid lives, they were solitaries who knew before everyone else.  They seemed in their obscurity to be twice, thrice, many times greater than any famous person—they, with their disdain of disclosing their prospects and their individual results.  I think they would have refused to consider themselves as anything other than things.

These ideas came to me in October of ’93, in those moments of leisure when thought merely plays at existing.

I was beginning not to think about them anymore, when I made the acquaintance of Monsieur Teste.  (I am thinking now of the traces a man leaves in the small space he moves in every day.)  Before becoming friends with Monsieur Teste, I was attracted by his particular appearance.  I studied his eyes, his clothes, his slightest muffled words to the waiter at the café where I saw him.  I wondered if he could sense that he was being observed.  I would quickly avert my gaze from his, only to surprise his following me.  I would pick up the newspapers he’d just left, and go over in my mind the sober gestures he made unawares; I noted that no one paid any attention to him.

I had nothing more of this sort to learn, when we became acquainted.  I saw him only at night.  Once in a kind of b……; often at the theater.  I heard he lived on modest weekly speculations on the stock market.  He took his meals in a little restaurant in the Rue Vivienne.  There he ate as if he were taking a purgative, with the same gusto.  Sometimes he permitted himself a slow, leisurely meal elsewhere.

Monsieur Teste was about forty.  His speech was extraordinarily rapid, his voice muted.  Everything about him was self-effacing, his eyes, his hands.  He had, however, military shoulders, and his gait was of a surprising regularity.  When he spoke, he never lifted an arm or a finger:  he had killed the marionette.  He did not smile, said neither good day nor good evening; he did not seem to hear a “How are you?”

His memory him gave me much to reflect on.  The features by which I could judge him brought to mind an unparalleled intellectual gymnastics.  This was not an exaggerated trait in him—it was a well-trained or transformed faculty.  Here are his own words: “It’s been twenty years since I had any books.  I burned my papers too.  I cut to the quick… I keep what I want.  But that’s not where the difficulty lies.  The hard thing is to keep what I will want tomorrow!  I’ve been searching for an automatic sieve…”

After much reflection, I came to believe that Monsieur Teste had managed to discover laws of the mind of which we are ignorant.  Surely, he must have devoted years to this research:  even more surely, more years, many more, had been set aside in order to mature his inventions and make them instinctual.  Finding is nothing.  The difficulty is incorporating what one finds.

The delicate art of duration, time, its distribution and regulation—expending it on well-chosen things, in order to give them exceptional nourishment—was one of Monsieur Teste’s great investigations.  He would watch for the repetition of certain ideas; he would water them with number.  This served finally to make the application of his conscious studies automatic.  He even sought to summarize this labor.  He often said: “Maturare!...”

Indeed his singular memory must have retained for him almost solely that part of our impressions our imagination alone is powerless to construct.  If we imagine a journey in a hot-air balloon, we can, with cleverness and effort, produce many of the probable sensations of an aeronaut; but there will always remain something unique to the actual ascent, and that difference from what we imagine expresses the value of the methods of an Edmond Teste.

This man had known quite early on the importance of what could be called human plasticity.  He had investigated its limits and mechanics.  How he must have mused over his own malleability!

I could glimpse feelings in him that made me tremble, a terrible persistence in intoxicating experiments.  He was a being absorbed in all his variations, one who becomes his own system, who devotes himself entirely to the terrifying discipline of the free mind, and who has his joys killed by his joys, the weakest by the strongest—the mildest, the temporal, the joy of the instant and of the hour just begun, all slain by the fundamental—by hope for the fundamental.

I had the feeling that he was master of his thought:  here I write an absurdity.  The expression of a feeling is always absurd.

Monsieur Teste had no opinions.  I think he felt passionately when he chose, in order to reach a definite goal.  What had he done with his personality? How did he see himself?...  Never did he laugh, never was there a look of unhappiness on his face.  He hated melancholy.

He spoke, and one felt as if one were inside his idea, confused with things:  one felt remote, mingled with houses, with the vastness of space, with the shifting colors of the street, with corners…  And the most skillfully touching words—the very ones that make their speaker closer to us than any other person, the ones that make us believe that the eternal wall between minds is falling—could come to him…  He was admirably aware that they would have moved anyone.  He spoke, and without being able to pinpoint the motives or extent of the prohibition, one noted that a large number of words were banished from his discourse.  The ones he used were sometimes so curiously sustained by his voice or illumined by his phrasing that their weight was altered, their merit renewed.  Sometimes they would lose all their meaning; they would seem to fill only a blank for which the appropriate term was still in doubt, or not supplied by language.  I have heard him designate a concrete object by a group of abstract words and proper nouns.

To what he said, there was no reply.  He killed polite agreement.  Conversations were kept going by leaps that did not surprise him.

If this man had changed the object of his inmost meditations, if he had turned the steady power of his mind against the world, nothing could have resisted him.  I’m sorry I’m talking about him the way one talks about those for whom statues are made.  I am well aware that between “genius” and him, there is a certain amount of weakness.  He, so real! so new! so free of any deception or illusion, so hard!  My own enthusiasm spoils him for me…

How can one not feel enthusiasm for one who never said anything vague? For one who calmly declared, “In all things I value only the ease or difficulty of knowing them, accomplishing them.  I take extreme care in measuring these degrees, and in not becoming attached…  What do I care about what I know all too well?”

How can one not be won over by a being whose mind seemed to transform for itself alone everything that is, a mind that worked out everything suggested to it?  I imagined that mind maneuvering, combining, varying, making connections, and in the vast expanse of its field of knowledge, being able to break off and change direction, enlighten, freeze this or heat that, submerge, lift up, name the nameless, forget at will, deaden or brighten this or that…

I am grossly simplifying impenetrable characteristics.  I dare not say everything my subject suggests.  Logic stops me.  But within myself, whenever the problem of Teste arises, curious formations take shape.  

There are days when I can see him again quite clearly.  He reappears in my memory, beside me.  I breathe in the smoke of our cigars, I hear him, I am on my guard.  Sometimes, reading a newspaper brings me up against his thinking, when some current event justifies it.  And I try a few more of those experiments in illusion that used to delight me during our evenings together.  That is, I imagine him doing what I did not see him do.  What is Monsieur Teste like when he is unwell? —In love, how does he reason?  —Can he be sad? —Of what might he be afraid? —What could make him tremble? …I pondered.  I held the complete image of this rigorous man before me, and tried to make it answer my questions…  It would shapeshift.

He loves, he suffers, he grows bored.  Everyone looks alike.  But with every sigh, or elemental groan, I want him to intermingle the rules and formulations of his whole mind.

It was exactly two years and three months ago this evening that I was with him at the theater, in a loaned box.  I’ve been thinking about this all day.

I can see him standing with the golden column of the Opéra; together.

He was looking only at the auditorium.  He was inhaling the great burning breath at the edge of the pit.  His face was flushed.

An immense girl made of copper separated us from a group whispering beyond the dazzlement.  In the depths of the vapor a naked patch of woman shone, smooth as a pebble.  Many of the spectators’ fans were living independently over this world of darkness and light, foaming up to the lights above.  My gaze spelled out a thousand tiny faces, came to rest on a sad head, ran along arms and over people, and finally flickered out.

Everyone was seated, free to move about a little.  I liked the system of classification, the almost theoretical simplicity of the audience, the social order.  I had the delightful sensation that everything breathing in this cube was going to follow its laws, flare up with laughter in great circles, grow excited in sections, feel in masses things that were intimate—unique—secret stirrings, rising up to the unavowable!  I wandered over these tiers of people, from row to row, in orbits, fancying I could ideally bring together all those who had the same disease, or the same theory, or the same vice…  One music touched us all, swelled, then grew very small.

It disappeared.  Monsieur Teste was murmuring: “We are only beautiful, only extraordinary, for others! They are eaten by others!”

The last word emerged from the silence made by the orchestra.  Teste breathed.

His flushed face, suffused with heat and color, his broad shoulders, his dark figure bronzed by the lights, the shape of the whole clothed mass of him, propped up by the large column, took me aback.  He lost not a single atom of all that became perceptible at each instant, in that red and gold expanse.

I looked at his skull as it acquainted itself with the angles of the capital, his right hand that was cooling itself on the gilt moldings; and, in the purple shadow, his large feet.  From the remote regions of the hall, his eyes came to meet mine; his mouth said: “Discipline is not bad…  It’s a start…”

I didn’t know how to reply.  He said in his low, swift voice: “May they enjoy and obey!”

For a long time he stared at a young man across from us, then at a lady, then a whole group in the upper galleries—who overflowed the balcony by five or six burning faces—and then at everyone, the whole theater, full as the heavens, eager, fascinated by the stage that we couldn’t see.  The stupefaction of all the others revealed to us that something sublime was happening.  We watched the dying of the light made by all the faces in the auditorium.  And when it was very dim, when the light no longer shone, the only thing that remained was the vast phosphorescence of these thousand faces.  I felt that this half-light made all these beings passive.  Their attention and the growing darkness formed a constant equilibrium.  I myself was necessarily attentive—to all that attention.

Monsieur Teste said: “The supreme simplifies them.  I’ll wager they’re all thinking, more and more, towards the same thing.  They will be equal confronted with crisis or the common limit.  For the rest, the law is not so simple…  since it leaves me out—yet—here I am.”

He added: “The lighting holds them.”

I said, laughing: “You too?”

He replied: “You too.”

“What a playwright you’d make!” I said. “You seem to be overseeing some experiment created on the borders of all the sciences!  I’d like to see a theater inspired by your meditations…”

He said: “No one meditates.”

The applause and the bright light chased us out.  We circled and went down.  The passersby seemed free.  Monsieur Teste complained gently of the midnight chill.  He alluded to old aches.

We walked along, and almost incoherent phrases slipped from his mouth.  Despite my efforts, I could only follow his words with great difficulty; all I could do was remember them.  The incoherence of speech depends on the one listening to it.  The mind seems to me to be made in such a way that it cannot be incoherent to itself.  Thus I have refrained from classifying Teste among the mad.  Besides, I could vaguely glimpse how his ideas held together, and I didn’t notice any contradiction in them; also, I would have dreaded too simple a solution.

We passed through streets softened by night, we turned at corners, into emptiness, finding our path instinctively—wider, narrower, wider.  His military pace made mine follow suit…

“And yet,” I replied, “how can we escape such powerful music!  And why should we?  I find a special intoxication in it—should I scorn that? I find in it the illusion of an immense labor, which might suddenly become impossible for me…  It gives me abstract sensations, delicious figures of all I love—of change, movement, intermingling, flux, transformation…  Do you deny that there are anesthetic things?  Trees that make us tipsy, men who give strength, girls who paralyze, skies that strike us dumb?”

Monsieur Teste replied, quite loudly:

“Well, Monsieur!  What does the ‘talent’ of your trees—or anybody’s—matter to me? I am at HOME in myself, I speak my language, I hate extraordinary things.  They are what weak minds require.  Take my word for it:  genius is easy, divinity is easy…  I simply mean— that I know how to conceive of them.  It is easy.

“Long ago—twenty years ago at least—anything above the ordinary accomplished by another person was a personal defeat to me.  In the past, I saw nothing but ideas stolen from me!  What stupidity!  …To say that our own image does not matter to us!  In imaginary battles, we treat it too well or too badly!”

He coughed.  He said to himself: “Of what is a man capable? Of what is a man capable...”  He said to me: “You know a man who knows that he doesn’t know what he’s saying!”

We were at his door.  He asked me to come in and smoke a cigar with him.

At the top floor of the house, we entered a very small “furnished” apartment.  I did not see a single book.  Nothing indicated the usual sort of work at a table, under a lamp, amongst pens and papers.  In the greenish room smelling of mint, there was nothing around the candle except drab abstract furniture—the bed, the clock, the wardrobe with a mirror, two armchairs—like rational beings.  On the mantelpiece, a few newspapers, a dozen visiting cards covered with numbers, and a medicine bottle.  I never had a stronger impression of anywhere at all.  It was any lodging, like the ‘any’ point in a theorem—and perhaps just as useful.  My host lived in the most general interior.  I thought about the hours he spent in that armchair.  I was afraid of the infinite sadness possible in this unaffected, ordinary place.  I have lived in such rooms; I could never think of them as permanent without a shudder.

Monsieur Teste spoke of money.  I don’t know how to reproduce his special eloquence:  it seemed to me less precise than usual.  Fatigue, the silence that was growing stronger as time passed, the bitter cigars, nighttime surrender, all seemed to be overtaking him.  I heard his voice growing lower and slower, making the single candle flame that burned between us dance, as he cited very large numbers, wearily.  Eight hundred ten million seventy-five thousand five hundred fifty…  I listened to this extraordinary music without following the calculation.  He was reciting for me the fluctuations of the stock market, and the long series of names of numbers struck me as poetry.  He compared events, industrial phenomena, public taste and passions, numbers again, one with another.  He said: “Gold is like the mind of society.”  

All of a sudden, he fell silent.  He was in pain.

Again I studied the cold room, the blankness of the furniture, so as not to look at him.  He picked up his vial and drank.  I got up to go.

“Stay a little longer,” he said, “you don’t mind.  I’m going to get into bed.  Soon I’ll fall asleep.  You can take the candle and go down.”

He undressed quietly.  His lean body swam under the covers and lay still.  Then he turned over and sank deeper into the too-short bed.

He said to me, smiling: “I’m doing the back-stroke.  I’m floating! …I feel an imperceptible rolling underneath—an immense movement? I sleep one or two hours at most, I who love to navigate the night.  Often I can’t tell the difference between my thoughts before sleep and those after.  I don’t know if I’ve been asleep.  In the past, as I was dozing off, I’d think of all that has given me pleasure—faces, things, moments.  I’d bring them to mind so that my thinking could be as gentle as possible, easy as the bed…  I am old.  I can show you that I feel old…  Remember! —When you’re a child you discover yourself, you slowly discover the space of your body, you express the particularity of your body—by a series of efforts, I suppose? You twist about and find yourself or rediscover yourself, and you’re astonished! You touch your heel, grasp your right foot with your left hand, take your cold foot in your warm palm! …Now I know myself by heart.  My heart too.  Bah! the whole Earth is marked out, all the flags cover all the territories…  My bed remains.  I love this current of sleep and bed linens:  this sheet that’s stretched and folded, or wrinkled—which falls over me like sand, when I lie ‘dead’ still—which coagulates around me in sleep…  It’s a very complex mechanism.  Along the warp or the woof, the slightest deviation…  Aaah!”

He was in pain.

“What’s wrong?” I said, “I could…”

“Ah,” he said, “it’s nothing much.  it’s…  a tenth of a second is showing itself…  Wait…  There are instants when my body is illuminated…  It’s very curious.  I can suddenly see inside myself…  I can make out the depths of the layers of my skin; and I can feel zones of pain, rings, poles, crests of pain.  Do you see these lively figures?  this geometry of my suffering?  There are these bright flashes that look just like ideas.  They make me understand— from here, to there…  And yet they leave me uncertain.  ‘Uncertain’ is not the word…  When that comes, I find in myself something confused or diffused.  There occur in my being places that are… foggy, there are expanses that come into view.  Then I take from my memory a question, any problem whatsoever…  I burrow into it.  I count grains of sand…  and, so long as I see them… —My increasing pain forces me to observe it.  I think about it!  —I wait only for my cry…  and as soon as I have heard it— the object, the terrible object, becoming smaller, and even smaller, conceals itself from my inner sight…

“Of what is a man capable? I fight against everything—except the suffering of my body, beyond a certain magnitude.  It is there, though, that I should begin.  Because to suffer is to give supreme attention to something, and I am rather a man of attention…  You should know that I had foreseen my future illness.  I had thought with precision about what everyone is certain of.  I think that this view of an obvious portion of the future should be part of one’s education.  Yes, I had foreseen what is now beginning.  At the time, it was an idea like any other.  And so, I was able to follow it.”

He became calm.

He curled up on his side, closed his eyes; and, after a minute, spoke again.  He was becoming lost.  His voice was only a whisper in the pillow.  His reddening hand was already asleep.

He went on: “I think, and that bothers nothing.  I am alone.  How comfortable solitude is! Nothing soft is weighing on me…  The same reverie here as in a ship’s cabin, the same as at the Café Lambert…  If embracing some Berthe becomes important, I am snatched away—as I am by pain…  Anyone who talks to me, if he doesn’t prove…  —he is an enemy.  I prefer the brilliance of the slightest fact to occur.  I am being, and seeing myself; seeing me see myself, and so on…  Let’s think close-up.  Bah! one falls asleep to any subject…  Sleep continues any idea at all…”

He was snoring quietly.  Even more quietly, I picked up the candle and crept away.

***

1 This preface was written for the second English translation of La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste.

2 A playful allusion to St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews 11:1:  “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” —Trans.

3 “The Cartesian life is the simplest one.”— Trans.

Charlotte Mandell has translated over forty books, including works by Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, André Breton, and Mathias Énard. Monsieur Teste is forthcoming from NYRB Classics. She was recently awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government. She's currently finishing her translation of the second volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the poet Robert Kelly.