There is a striking contrast between Valéry’s verse, which seems closed to the evocation of science and technology, and his aesthetic reflections, which insistingly call upon these disciplines and find numerous models drawn from them. But Valéry’s theory only dialogues with these fields to better reassert its incapacity to constitute a science by itself, and to limit the validity of its own technical metaphors, while it is perhaps those of his poems that are the most distant from epistemology and from the modern world which act out his thinking about the nature of an apparatus.