Poèmes followed by Venise sauvée and Lettre de Paul Valéry

One of fifty-six copies on Lafuma-Navarre pure thread vellum, paper only.

This collection, prefaced by a letter from Paul Valéry, includes about ten unpublished poems by Simone Weil. Philosophically inspired, classical in their form, they reveal the author's precocious talent. It includes a poem of circumstance, composed at the high school for Saint-Charlemagne, and a tale written at the age of eleven.
Venise sauvée is a tragedy that Simone Weil began writing in 1940. Death prevented her from finishing it. She had summarized this play thus: "It is the conspiracy of the Spanish against Venice in 1618, recounted by the Abbé de Saint-Réal." To clarify her intentions and complete this text that remained unfinished, we publish as a preface the scattered notes in Simone Weil's notebooks. This text had already been published in 1955 in La Nouvelle Revue française .

Simone Weil

Born in Paris in 1909, Simone Weil was a disciple of Alain, a student at the École Normale Supérieure, and an agrégée in philosophy in 1931. A worker at Renault (1934-1935), and enlisted in the International Brigades in 1936, she left France in 1942 for New York and finally London, where she worked in the offices of La France Combattante. Suffering from tuberculosis, she died on August 24, 1943 at the Grosvenor Sanatorium.