René Martin-Guelliot to Jean Paulhan, 1912, 6

My dear friend,

Since you have been accepted - which I congratulate you on and will ask you to indicate to me the consequences - it will be better for us to clarify these questions orally. I will go and wait for you at the Odéon one morning as you tell me.
Our objectives are so different that we constantly need to fine-tune them, which would lengthen the letters indefinitely. So I'm only focusing on 2 details.
“If I felt taken aback for a moment, and if I could have been definitely taken aback, it is because your argument seemed decisive to me.” But it was not, or was not to the degree that I “felt” it.
Besides, I temporarily abandon this observation, I accept what you say: but not that I imagine the common mind as similar to mine. Quite the contrary. If that were so, the arguments would not frighten me in the least. It is precisely because they are not objects of analysis for the common mind that I address them with the reproaches that you say, it is precisely because they are a whole, to which it responds automatically. — Because, to return to the conversation on the theater, if I admit with you (without difficulty) that a "man of intelligence would not have been taken aback" it is because, convinced of being right, he would have "automatically" found a counter-argument (I agree with you), a complete reply, in the same mental tone - And, the question [...] being [...], this one [...] not necessarily, but in many cases (at least it is my personal experience) was bad at countering it.
— By saying "bad", I am not begging the question. I simply want to say "let's state a confusion regarding the terms which is not clearly perceived or perceivable as such at first glance."
Let us again agree on my distrust of arguments. Distrust as long as they are not analyzed, as long as one believes that in a penny is a penny the two words are identical; and the word is pure copula.
We have an opposite goal. This is the reason for this paradoxical fact that you thought you were attributing to me alone the effect of arguments on the common mind exactly the opposite of the idea that I have. I have precisely the idea that you have, and it is precisely this idea that makes me conclude that there is distrust.

See you soon, right?
R.M.G.