"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 turbulent life. Such stability does not last, however: We meet Marceline just before she is about to leave Paris yet again in search of better work for her and her husband. It is always hard to leave vibrant, sophisticated Paris, but Marceline is torn now also from Henri Latouche, her unattractive, dilettante, but utterly captivating lover.
We witness Marceline's transformation from a celebrated actress to a struggling poet, trying desperately to leave the stage behind her once and for all, embarrassed by playing ingenues as she advances in years, despite the adulation of her audience. We watch her fall in love repeatedly, with a young soldier, with the handsome actor she is to marry, with the ill-fated Latouche. We feel her hurt as she buries child after child, her dream of being a mother deferred cruelly time and time again. But most of all, we share in her transcendence of daily life as she achieves the height of her art and rises above her circumstances, avoiding the sad fates of her widowed father and siblings, who fall prey to drink and madness. The Last Rendezvous is a Romantic novel in every sense of the word, and is as irresistible as its tragic but triumphant leading lady, who chose to live her life with daring as a modern woman ahead of her time.