Part one of the story concludes with a slightly annotated list of Menard's "visible" work. From the list we learn that Menard is a very minor symbolist poet and an intellectual with a number of disparate, narrow, and highly idiosyncratic interests. Menard has published a sonnet and written a sonnet cycle "for the Baroness de Bacourt," and has done extensive work in literary theory and criticism. In addition to writing "an invective against Paul Valery," an invective which expresses "the exact opposite of his true opinion of Valery," he has

written a monograph on the possibility of constructing
a poetic vocabulary of concepts which would not be
synonyms or periphrases of those which make up our
everyday language, "but rather ideal objects created
according to convention and essentially designed to
satisfy poetic needs."

He's also examined the "essential metric laws of French prose," as well as replied...