The Last Rendezvous
Anne Plantagenet
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 1590512782
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Women are not supposed to write; yet I write.” –Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
In 1817, at the late age of thirty-three,Marceline Desbordes, the actress and Romantic poet–the only woman counted by Paul Verlaine among his poètes maudits, or “accursed poets,” a group that included Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and Alfred de Vigny–marries Prosper Valmore, a fellow actor who brings love and stability to her tumultuous life. Such stability is short-lived, however:When she meets Henri de Latouche, an influential man of letters, they soon begin a passionate affair. Although their tryst does not last more than a year, their relationship survives through letters and memory. It sparks inspiration in Marceline’s work and leads her to create some of the most beautiful poetry in French literature. A talented poet, a romantic woman, a passionate lover, a nurturing mother, and a child at heart, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore is rescued from obscurity through Plantagenet’s dazzling writing in this fictionalized biography. The book will include a selection of Desbordes-Valmore’s poems in the original French and in an English translation by the Pulitzer Prize—winning poet Louis Simpson.
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separation had made breaks in our life histories and worn creases at the corners of our eyes. We talked nonstop for hours. But once I had learned about her life and once I had told her the story of mine, our conversations gradually tapered off. Still, I loved feeling her calm and unquestioning gaze on me, her silent and unchanging friendship. Ageless. The past always brought us together. Together Albertine and I ran through the tombs of Notre-Dame. I NEVER WOULD have thought so, but I missed
Eugène. I had slid without much resistance into the insensibility of his love and was allowing torpor to overcome me. He invited me to return to Rouen. “You mustn’t fret about material problems,” he wrote. He would take care of everything. Meaning that I would be his mistress, kept by him in a plush and discreet apartment. An arrangement I had always refused whenever it was proposed to me, as to every actress. I relied only on myself. To turn myself over so completely to another frightened me.
suffered that I might be allowed to have my way, my husband makes a final bow toward the boulevards of Paris and sets off again for the Rhône Valley. I must follow him, having no other choice. My income is meager, my future more uncertain even than his. In March 1834, I take the road to Lyon with my daughters. Prosper went ahead several days earlier, and Hippolyte has gone back to Grenoble. I CAN HARDLY believe it. We are back on the place Terreaux, where we lived during our first stay in Lyon.
will his perversity extend? He is as handsome as the day, and I am already sunset. He can have all the soubrettes he wants. Jealousy rises in me, and a sense of my powerlessness. By what bizarre force is he driven toward my sour face and empty mother’s body? No, no. This ardor I see is a lie. I knew him as a child. He is still only a boy. I am beyond dalliances. He must have heard of my misadventures, my past dishonor. Under my theater dress, I am a bruised and shriveled woman. The kind one no
should devote myself exclusively to writing. This was just what I had been longing to hear. Dizzy from the success of my first book of verse, I believed them. WHEN IN SPRING 1819 the Brussels public learned of my planned departure, it booed me harshly. It couldn’t have mattered less to me. After an agony of many weeks, my friend Albertine had just died. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to keep me in Belgium any longer. 19. HENRI AND I ARE AT WAR. January 1840: I destroy all his
