1. Ginette Mathiot, Je sais cuisiner (1932;rpt. Paris:Editions Albin Michel, 1965), p. 13.

2. René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. Etienne Gilson (1925;rpt. Paris: Vrin, 1976), pp. 18-19.

3. In fact, the dean of American cookbook authors, Irma S. Rombauer, in the introduction to the Joy of Cooking, says, "To live we must eat." She goes on to discuss foods and nutrition, but there is nothing like the step-by-step logical progression of thought that we find in Mathiot. And Fannie Farmer, in The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, launches right into a lesson on the basic processes of cooking, without ever stopping to ask why we cook in the first place. See Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, Joy of Cooking (1931; rpt. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), p. 1;and Fannie Farmer, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, 11th ed. (1869; rpt. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), p. 3.

4. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (The Crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology), ed. Walter Biemel, vol. 6 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke, ed. H. L. Van Breda (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 75; my translation. There is an English translation, by David Carr, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970). The quoted passage in Carr's translation appears on p. 73.

5. Husserl, Krisis, p. 75; Crisis, p. 73.

6. Descartes, Règles utiles et claires pour la direction de I'esprit en la re - soft

cherche de la vérité (Useful and Clear rules for the direction of the mind in the search for truth), translated into French by Jean-Luc Marion (The Hague: Martsinus Nijhoff, 1977), p. 6.

7. Mallarmé to Francois Coppée, December 5, 1866, Correspondance, p. 234 (Mallarmé's emphasis).

8. Mallarmé to Théodore Aubanel, July 28, 1866, Correspondance, p. 225 (Mallarmé's emphasis).

9. Scherer, Le "Livre" de Mallarmé, 37-38 (A).

10. Valéry's anecdote is cited in OC, pp. 1581—82. It is excerpted from Variété II (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1929), pp. 169-75.

11. James A. Boon, From Symbolism to Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972). See especially op. 155-58.

12. Paul Valéry, Oeuvres (henceforth O ) (Paris: Pléiade, 1957-60), 2:25. The three periods are Valéry's.

13. For an account of Valéry's education in mathematics, see Reiro Virtanen, "Paul Valéry's Scientific Education," Symposium 27 (1973): 362-78. Some of the same material appears in Virtanen's book, The Scientific Analogies of Paul Valéry, University of Nebraska Studies, n.s., no. 47 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1974). Some other studies of Valéry and mathematics are Albert Gaudin, "Paul Valéry et les mathématiques," French Review 19 (1946): 271-78; Jeannine Jallat, "Valéry and the Mathematical Language of Identity and Difference," Yale French Studies 44 (1970): 51-64; and Judith Robinson, "Language, Physics and Mathematics in Valéry's Cahiers," Modern Language Review 55 (1960): 519-36.

14. Two important books on Valéry's Notebooks are Judith Robinson, L'analyse de l'esprit dans les Cahiers de Valéry (Paris: José Corti, 1963), and Nicole Celeyrette-Pietri, Valéry et le moi: Des Cahiers à l'oeuvre (Paris: Klinck-sieck, 1979).

15. Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1957-61), 24:762. This edition will be cited in the text as C . The passage is also in the two-volume edition of excerpts from the Cahiers, edited by Judith Robinson (Paris: Pléiade, 1973-74), 1:197. Henceforth citations of the Robinson edition will follow in brackets after the main citation. Valéry's punctuation in the Cahiers is odd. I've retained it as much as possible in my translations. Emphasis in these quotations is always Valéry's.

16. For a series of perspectives on the System, see the essays collected in Paul Valéry 3 : Approche du «Système», ed. Huguette Laurenti, Revue des lettres modernes 554-59 (1979).

17. Cited in Jean Hytier, La poétique de Valéry (Paris: Armand Colin, 1970), p. 37.