Henri de RÉGNIER. Autograph manuscript signed, La Vie Littéraire. Marcel Proust, André Gide, Paul Valéry par Paul Souday, 3 volumes, Kra - Mallarmé par Jean Royère, 1 vol. Kra; 5 1/2 pages in-4. Column published in Le Figaro, September 27, 1927, devoted mainly to Paul Souday's studies of Marcel Proust, André Gide and Paul Valéry. Régnier first discusses the "errors" of the Critique, and the work of the literary critic, to which Souday has "brought his own qualities of intelligence and talent. He shows himself to be curious and well-informed about all manifestations of the mind, and he combines a very solid and extensive culture with a rare firmness of judgment and a frankness of opinion that goes as far as rudeness".... Régnier then turns rather harsh on André Gide: "I don't deny M. Gide a certain literary value, and some of his early works are not without merit. There is some estimable work in Les Nourritures terrestres and La Porte étroite, but how can M. Souday attach any importance to a platitude like La Symphonie pastorale or to absurd flights of fancy like Les Caves du Vatican and Les Faux-monnayeurs? Fortunately, he points to the disgusting pages in Si le grain ne meurt to condemn them. How did M. Paul Souday allow himself to be taken in by the pretentious mediocrity of this mediocre prose writer?"... He points out that Souday was one of the first to hail "in Marcel Proust a writer of the most curious and personal originality, gifted with an extremely subtle psychological sense"; he gives "an exact account of the development of Proust's work, whose singular novelty he had foreseen from the outset, and whose impact he had foreseen"... As for Paul Valéry, he is "a master of the most profound and acute resources of language, and he invents them only with the support of classical and traditional data. His boldness and ingenuity of thought accommodate the rules of usage and the usual expressive means, while knowing how to give them a particular twist and accent. As a poet and prose writer, Paul Valéry does not resort to any of the linguistic stratagems dear to writers of decadence. Whether he's evoking the Jeune Parque or the Cimetière marin, conversing with Eupalinos or disserting in Variétés, his style employs the same syntactic structures and makes use of the same verbal material. The hermeticism of his writings has no formal cause; it comes from the elliptical play of thought, the disjunction of ideas or the unforeseen nature of their relationships"... The article concludes with a review of Jean Royère's book on Stéphane Mallarmé, prefaced by Valéry, which "sketches in passing a brief picture of what Mallarmé's work was and could have been, had it not remained a mirage of magnificent aesthetic and poetic possibilities [...]. [...] In a moving and discreet chapter, M. Jean Royère tells us that the noble life of this heroic and pure poet who devoted it all to the meditation and domination of his Dream, and never consented to sacrifice to it anything other than the indispensable hours to be given to the necessities of an existence that was only the condition of his true life, the one in which he found himself, solitary and magnificently, face to face with himself". Attached is a press photograph of the inauguration of the monument to Paul Souday at Père-Lachaise (April 24, 1931); and press clippings.