To think does it not mean to delve deeper into the concept of order? See how the blind Tree with its diverging members grows around itself in the sense of Symmetry. Within it, life weighs, erects a structure, and radiates its number with its branches and their offshoots, and each offshoot, its leaf, with the edges already marked by the gestating future...

Two decades after 'Eupalinos or The Architect' and 'Soul and Dance,' two Socratic dialogues both published in 1921, on October 25, 1943, Valéry reads 'Dialogue on the Tree' at the Institute of France. Shortly before, he had completed the translation into free verse of Virgil's 'Eclogues.' The Tree preoccupies the poet in his later years as he moves toward the end of his life amidst the heavy climate of the German Occupation.

In 1944, the three dialogues will be published together in one volume. Paul Valéry, who was born in 1871, will die in 1945 having witnessed liberation.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]