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When Paul Valéry published Degas Danse Dessin in 1936, he was reminiscing upon his friendship with Edgar Degas. The book, which vindicates discontinuity and aggregation, was first published as a series of loose sheets, and advertised itself as a “kind of monologue” where Valéry promised to deliver memories and reflections. In fact, the work sketches a kind of pas de deux between Degas and Valéry, text and image, drawing and dance, where the author associates the art of the painter and the mechanisms of creation with a “sacred dance” and connects drawing, understood to be a series of signs, with a form of written language Valéry is in charge of decoding. This paper shows how the DDD, a sort of biography choreographed in fragments, links two forms of creation – that of Degas, that of Valéry – and analyses through the “dance of the painter” the spiritual dance Valéry puts at the heart of everything.