Pen and China-ink, watercolor, golden gouache highlights on slight lead pencil lines et encre de Chine, aquarelle
300 × 234 mm
Watermark : LES CENT UNE
Provenance : library of an academician

In 1940 Valéry began writing two plays on the theme of Faust, Lust and Le Solitaire, which remained unfinished and were brought together in 1946 in the collection Mon Faust. The Études pour mon Faust published in 1941 by the « Cent Une », a society of women bibliophiles, include a title page and banners based on drawings by the writer: this sheet is in fact a Arches wove paper (with the watermark of the Cent Une) identical to the one used for the edition of the Études.
Surrounded by snakes and demons, an imposing figure, perhaps Mephisto’s, is holding a model of a theatre stage with Faust and Lust in a garden. This is certainly the fifth scene in the second act of the play, during which the hero exposes the power of his sense of life to his companion. We recognise in the woman’s head on the right-hand side of the drawing the features of Jeanne Loviton, also known by the pseudonym Jean Voilier, with whom Valéry fell in love in 1937.