From “Memoirs, Conversations, and Diaries,” by Elizabeth Hardwick (Collected Essays, NYRB, 2017):

Alain, the philosopher and writer, arrives first, Valéry two or three minutes later. “Les deux illustres,” meeting for the first time, introduced by Henri Mondor, sit down and begin to order luncheon. Valéry, refusing the duck in favor of the meat, remarks, “Without meat, you would have with you only M. Néant.” Alain professes himself able to eat anything, adds that because of his teaching at the Normale he drinks very little, except sometimes milk. Valéry also likes milk, he explains, but goes to excess only with coffee. And then Alain, unable to restrain himself another moment: “Avez-vous travaillé, ce matin, Orphée?” (Italics mine.) Yes, Valéry works in the morning and at eleven o’clock his work for the day is finished.”

…

The information above on the first meeting of Alain and Valéry is taken from a current copy of the recently revived La Nouvelle NRF. At the beginning, M. Mondor informs us that this same event, this “déjeuner chez Lapérouse,” was committed to print by Alain himself and appeared in the old NRF in 1939. M. Mondor, robust meeter and recorder, has also written on the first meeting of Valéry and Claudel and even the great “premier entretien” of Mallarmé and Valéry. His document on the latter begins with the information gleaned from the Alain conference: “Paul Valéry, almost every day, after eleven o’clock in the morning liked to rest from his work.” It is by repetition and excess that a national eccentricity is recognized.

From “Simone Weil,” by Elizabeth Hardwick (Collected Essays, NYRB, 2017):

Simone Weil was a student of the philosopher Alain (Émile Chartier). Alain was a special figure as a writer and teacher in Paris in the 1920s – one of those arresting French academic stars who throw the light of their ideas and the style of their thinking over young intellectuals and have a dramatic fame quite unusual here. His Propos, essays on many aspects of culture, very likely confirmed Simone Weil’s own genius as a philosopher working in the form of passionate essays rather than in theoretical explication of positions and arguments.

Alain’s attention was given to morality, good deeds, the exercise of will by which one becomes free, to pacifism and to suspicion of the need to exercise power over others. In many ways these thoughts pre-figure the great themes of Simone Weil’s writings. Her own nature was, of course, much more extreme; that is, she was determined to live out truth, not as an example which would have involved the vanities and impositions of leadership, but as a dedication marked by obsessive discipline.