Stéphane MALLARMÉ. Autograph manuscript, [L'idéal à vingt ans], Valvins near Fontainebleau August 17, 1898; 1page in-8 (22 x 14cm) on laid paper. Draft of a quasi-testamentary response to a survey on the ideal. [The survey conducted by Jean-Bernard for Le Figaro from August to September 1898 asked: "At the age of twenty, what was your ideal life, your dream? Has middle age fulfilled it?" Mallarmé's answer appeared on August 29, a few days before the poet's death on September 9]. This draft contains numerous cross-outs, corrections and interlinear additions, as well as numerous variants (partially noted in the Pléiade) with the published text, which is dated August 18; a second, non-final state exists in the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet (MNR Ms. 1241). We have put some of the crossed-out words in square brackets. "What was my ideal at twenty, it's not unlikely that I expressed it even faintly, since [the manifestation] the act I chose [was] to write: now, if mature age has realized it, this judgment rests with the people alone who have prolonged their interest in me. As for an intimate autobiographical appraisal, [which would remain] one of those one indulges in, particularly, [alone to] alone or in the presence of a rare guest, I will add, in the diary, according to your wish, with a view to uttering something, that, sufficiently, I was faithful to myself, so that my humble life kept a meaning. The means, I publish, consists daily in dusting off, from the hazardous external contribution, my native illumination, which is rather [generally] collected under [the appellation] the name of experience. Happy or vain, my twenty-year-old will still holds." Below a line, Mallarmé adds this reflection, which will be published in the diary, at the head of his reply, as an "unpublished thought": "Never does [a] thought present itself to me, detached, I have none of that kind and remain here in embarrassment: mine form the [supreme] trait, musically placed, of a whole and, in isolating themselves, I feel them lose even their truth and sound false: after all, this confession, perhaps, figures one, [fit to preserve] suitable for the blank page of an album." Exhibition: Mallarmé, Musée d'Orsay, 1998, no. 345 (reprod. p.18). Provenance: Françoise and Paul Morel collection (Sotheby's sale October 15, 2015, no. 177). Œuvres complètes (Bibl. de la Pléiade), t.II, p. 672-673, 1736.