Catherine Pozzi (1882 - 1934) was a poetess and French Woman of letters.

• Photo

  of Catherine Pozzi

Photo
• of Catherine Pozzi

Its life

Catherine Marthe Louise Pozzi is born in an aristocratic and middle-class medium from the end from the XIXe century, Samuel Pozzi, surgeon and gynecologist, and of Therese Loth-Cazalis. The family, brilliant and cultivated, attends easy people, the artists, the writers (José-Maria de Heredia, Paul Le Bourget…). Catherine will have two younger brothers, Jacques and Jean.

Young person, it studies with tutors; it is interested in the music, practical tennis and horsemanship. As of the 11 years age, it starts to hold a first Newspaper. She also studies a year with Oxford.

At 25 years, she marries, without conviction, the dramatic author with success Edouard Bourdet. In 1909 is born their son Claude, who will be resistant and deportee during the Second world war.

Towards 1910 appear the symptoms of the Tuberculose from which she will suffer from now on until her death.

It launches out in the study of the history of philosophy and the religions, mathematics and sciences, and is the pupil of Marie Jaëll. In 1918, it passes its vat, at 37 years. It is this year that his/her father is assassinated by one of its ex-patients, afflicted with mania persecution.

It is the friend Rainer Maria Rilke, Anna de Noailles, Jean Paulhan (editor association of the New French Review), Colette, Henri de Régnier, Pierre Jean Jouve inter alia.

She starts in 1920 a tumultuous relation with Paul Valéry, which will last eight years and will give place to an important correspondence. The rupture with this one will move away it from Paris of the living rooms and will cause at it a painful feeling of loneliness.

She dies in Paris on December 3rd 1934, mined by the Tuberculose, the Morphine and the Laudanum.

This “ large young woman, gracious and ugly ” (Jean Paulhan), elegant, sporting, lucid, but also intransigent and proud, was all its life, vis-a-vis the suffering, assoiffée of absolute and tormented need to believe.

Its work

Catherine Pozzi is known especially for six fulgurating poems, published in 1935 ( Mesures ), and which she regarded as her literary will: Ave , Vale , Scopolamine , Nova , Maya and Nyx . This last ( Nyx means “the night” in Greek), was made up “ of a feature ”, on November 5th, 1934, little before its death. It leaves also an anonymous autobiographical news: Agnes (NRF, 1927), and an unfinished philosophical test: Skin of Heart . Some scientific articles of it were published in Le Figaro.

More recently, the publication of sound Newspaper (1913-1934) and of sound Journal of youth (1893-1906) renewed the interest at its place. The part of its correspondence with Paul Valéry published represents in fact only one small portion of the exchanged letters, those having survived the wish, having expressed by Catherine Pozzi in her will, that these letters are destroyed.

Certain poems of Catherine Pozzi evoke sometimes those of Louise Labé, but their breath and their tension seem without common measurement with this work of the XVIe century.

Quotations

• “the horror of my life, it is loneliness. Because I am a disabled person. I then not to join the others, never. From there, these intoxications by a feeling, and these spiritual matter vices. ” (May 15th, 1927).

• “What cannot become night or flame, it should be concealed”.

A poem