French author born and grown up in the southern French port of Sète, where his father was a customs officer. Through his parents, Valéry was of both Corsican and Italian stock and would all his life feel intimately connected with the Mediterranean region. His precocious intelligence gave him a special position among his friends during his upper secondary school years in Montpellier, and already as an 18-year-old, he published formally assured poems inspired by Symbolism and its central figure, Stéphane Mallarmé, with whom he started a correspondence. His encounter with Mallarmé's strict and extremely intellectual ideal and an unhappy love affair gave rise to such a serious crisis in the young poetry talent that he turned his back to poetry for many years to come in the conviction that the act of writing was an act of vanity. Approximately at the same time, he finished his law studies in Montpellier and took up residence in Paris, where he began systematic studies in philosophy, mathematics and natural science and supported himself through modest secretary positions, first at the Ministry of War and next in the first modern news agency of the world, Agence Havas, until 1922.