Gustave KAHN (1859-1936). Autograph manuscript signed, Stéphane Mallarmé, [October 1898]; 3pages large in-8. Beautiful tribute to Mallarmé, published in La Critique, October 20, 1898 (no. 88, p. 181). "The beauty of L'Après-midi d'un faune, Les Sonnets and Hérodiade is no longer debated: those who know how to read realize the many new insights that arise from the pages of Divagations. Le Phénomène futur and the other prose poems remain among the masterpieces of this technique and of literature. Mallarmé was the most charming, the most prestigious of conversationalists. His teaching was fruitful. All these merits add up to a great writer, and he was something even better. Mallarmé was an example of quiet audacity, where one is most fearful, in the realm of the pure idea. At the beginning of his life, armed with every talent and the author of unequalled poems, he felt that [...] art is everything, but only if it is based on a fresh view of things. He perceived a law, analogy, the link between seemingly diverse phenomena, between the discontinuous series of images that make up the world. He said: "The world is made to end in a beautiful book. He was right. The world exists in a state of scattered consciousness that must be synthesized at certain times into beautiful books. [...] Alongside the beautiful work, there is the man who was, by logic and intuition, a diviner, an inspired man.