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The Last Rendezvous
"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.
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.
304 pages, Paperback
First published September 8, 2004
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About the author
Anne Plantagenet
46 books6 followersAnne Plantagenet was born in 1972 in Burgundy and spent her childhood in Champagne. After stays in London and Seville, she now lives in Paris. She has published translations from the Spanish; two biographies, Marilyn Monroe (Gallimard, 2007) and Manolete (Ramsay, 2005); a first novel, Un Coup de corne fut mon premier baiser (Ramsay, 1998); and an acclaimed story collection, Pour les siècles des siècles (Stock, 2008). The Last Rendezvous is the recipient of the 2005 Prix du récit biographique of the Académie internationale des arts et collections.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 19, 2018
The Last Rendezvous: A Novel is the fictional autobiography of the dedicated poet and reluctant actress, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, who lived from 1786 to 1859. As Anne Plantagenet notes in her “Acknowledgments” to the novel, “[t]his novel distorts historical reality throughout. The actual life of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, French woman of letters (b. Douai, 1786; d. Paris, 1859) was likely quite different from the one recounted here. And Marceline Desbordes-Valmore would not have told her story as I have. She would not have told it at all.”
Marceline definitely is not portrayed as a shrinking violet in The Last Rendezvous. In fact, she appears to wallow in her emotions, while disregarding those of her husband, Prosper Valmore, as well as those of her lover and inspiration for most of her poetic genius, Hyacinthe Thabaud de Latouche, more familiarly known as Henri. For a large portion of the novel, Marceline portrays herself as being torn between the stability that her husband provides and the intoxication of her romantic involvement with her reclusive and eccentric lover. The intensity and depth with which Plantagenet reveals the quandaries that beset Marceline are dwelt on as though they come from the personal explorations contained in an intimate journal.
Plantagenet alternates chapters between the young Marceline, who is torn away from her father and other siblings in her mother’s elopement of the spirit to the Antilles islands, where her mother succumbs to ill health, and the older, more emotionally drained, Marceline, who can only find respite in the arms of her physically unattractive, though intellectually astute, lover. Readers are inevitably encouraged to compare the older and the younger Marceline, which facilitates them becoming involved in the sequence of events. The dichotomy between present and past is not only intriguing, adding to the multilayered feel of the text, but it also mirrors the spirit of the correspondence on which Marceline spent much of her life, even coming to refer to it as her “religion.”
Marceline’s own waywardness, as it is portrayed in the pages of this novel, seems to be part hereditary, part due to her unusual upbringing. She appears to feel no remorse about her actions, which were far from conventional at the time. However, her compassion for social outcasts, as well as for her alcoholic father and brother, reveal traits of kindness, to which she makes only passing reference, as she does to the political and social upheaval of the revolutionary times in which she lived. Anne Plantagenet’s personal knowledge of the French landscape, including that of the distinction between Parisian and small town life, adds resonance to the text.
The work ends with a selection of poems by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, which are given both in their original French and in their English translation by Louis Simpson, with the assistance of Willard Wood. Included are “Elegy” (“Élégie”), “If He Had Known” (“S’il l’avait su”), “No Longer” (“Je ne sais plus, je ne veux plus”), “The Last Rendezvous” (“Le dernier rendez-voux”), “Apart” (“Les séparés”), “Waiting” (“l’Attente”), “Are You Asleep?” (“Dors-tu?”), “The Sincere Woman” (“La Sincère”), “Go in Peace” (“Allez en paix”), “The Roses of Saadi” (“Les roses de Saadi”), and “Intermittent Dream of a Sad Night” (“Rêve intermittent d’une nuit triste”).
Anne Plantagenet was awarded the 2005 Award for Narrative Biography by the Académie internationale des arts et collections for Seule au rendez-vous. This novel should appeal to all who are interested in the Romantic Movement and the literary outpourings of women. However, it can also be read as a straightforward period romance, so The Last Rendezvous: A Novel should be blessed with a wide reading audience.
Marceline definitely is not portrayed as a shrinking violet in The Last Rendezvous. In fact, she appears to wallow in her emotions, while disregarding those of her husband, Prosper Valmore, as well as those of her lover and inspiration for most of her poetic genius, Hyacinthe Thabaud de Latouche, more familiarly known as Henri. For a large portion of the novel, Marceline portrays herself as being torn between the stability that her husband provides and the intoxication of her romantic involvement with her reclusive and eccentric lover. The intensity and depth with which Plantagenet reveals the quandaries that beset Marceline are dwelt on as though they come from the personal explorations contained in an intimate journal.
Plantagenet alternates chapters between the young Marceline, who is torn away from her father and other siblings in her mother’s elopement of the spirit to the Antilles islands, where her mother succumbs to ill health, and the older, more emotionally drained, Marceline, who can only find respite in the arms of her physically unattractive, though intellectually astute, lover. Readers are inevitably encouraged to compare the older and the younger Marceline, which facilitates them becoming involved in the sequence of events. The dichotomy between present and past is not only intriguing, adding to the multilayered feel of the text, but it also mirrors the spirit of the correspondence on which Marceline spent much of her life, even coming to refer to it as her “religion.”
Marceline’s own waywardness, as it is portrayed in the pages of this novel, seems to be part hereditary, part due to her unusual upbringing. She appears to feel no remorse about her actions, which were far from conventional at the time. However, her compassion for social outcasts, as well as for her alcoholic father and brother, reveal traits of kindness, to which she makes only passing reference, as she does to the political and social upheaval of the revolutionary times in which she lived. Anne Plantagenet’s personal knowledge of the French landscape, including that of the distinction between Parisian and small town life, adds resonance to the text.
The work ends with a selection of poems by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, which are given both in their original French and in their English translation by Louis Simpson, with the assistance of Willard Wood. Included are “Elegy” (“Élégie”), “If He Had Known” (“S’il l’avait su”), “No Longer” (“Je ne sais plus, je ne veux plus”), “The Last Rendezvous” (“Le dernier rendez-voux”), “Apart” (“Les séparés”), “Waiting” (“l’Attente”), “Are You Asleep?” (“Dors-tu?”), “The Sincere Woman” (“La Sincère”), “Go in Peace” (“Allez en paix”), “The Roses of Saadi” (“Les roses de Saadi”), and “Intermittent Dream of a Sad Night” (“Rêve intermittent d’une nuit triste”).
Anne Plantagenet was awarded the 2005 Award for Narrative Biography by the Académie internationale des arts et collections for Seule au rendez-vous. This novel should appeal to all who are interested in the Romantic Movement and the literary outpourings of women. However, it can also be read as a straightforward period romance, so The Last Rendezvous: A Novel should be blessed with a wide reading audience.
June 7, 2010
The flap copy calls this a "Romantic novel in every sense of the word," which it is: it's a romance, a love story, and also a story set in the Romantic era, with protagonists who are part of the French Romantic literary/musical/dramatic scene. It's the story of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, first an actress, then a poet, and it's the story of her loves: her ill-fated affairs, her marriage, and her great love for the writer Henri de Latouche. It moves back and forth in time, starting in 1821 and moving ahead but also looking back, in alternating chapters, at Marceline's youth and early adulthood, and it has its poetic moments, but it's mostly straight first-person narration, which I found less compelling than I thought it'd be.
Not that I wasn't reasonably interested in Marceline and her story, particularly her dual love for her husband and for Latouche, but the narration struck me as so inward-looking, so centered on Marceline's emotions and her story, herself as the actress and writer of her own life, with comparatively few scene-setting details, comparatively few descriptions of the world. The narrator of the novel is an "I" that loves and feels and moves through the world; I could have done with more description and less feeling; I would have liked for more of the story to be told indirectly, with the description of a time or a place creating a mood, and letting the reader infer more about the emotion of the story from that. At one point in the novel, Marceline talks about how critics berated her performances for having "an excess of sensibility," and that's sometimes how I felt about the book as a whole (p 54).
That said, I like how the book starts right with Marceline's voice, with the emotional heart of things, with this: "I spent the afternoon with Henri. Again the same vertigo, as though walking an exposed ridge and not knowing which side to fall on, a wild commotion in my chest." (p 1). And there are some lovely bits of detail: the "orange-colored bergère" in Henri's apartment, by the piano and the window, his tall windows and their view of the Seine, the sand strewn on the floor in the Flemish fashion in Marceline's first childhood home, the bits and moods of the cities she sees as an actress, from one city to the next. I liked this a lot:
And this:
I wanted more of that, more about place, more about light, more about streets and buildings, which isn't quite to say less of Marceline herself. I do like the idea of self-invention and self-reinvention, telling stories as a way to make sense of things, Marceline saying, of herself at a young age, "already I was learning to retell my life" (p 89). But though I would say I enjoyed this book well enough, it didn't really resonate with me as much as I thought it might.
Not that I wasn't reasonably interested in Marceline and her story, particularly her dual love for her husband and for Latouche, but the narration struck me as so inward-looking, so centered on Marceline's emotions and her story, herself as the actress and writer of her own life, with comparatively few scene-setting details, comparatively few descriptions of the world. The narrator of the novel is an "I" that loves and feels and moves through the world; I could have done with more description and less feeling; I would have liked for more of the story to be told indirectly, with the description of a time or a place creating a mood, and letting the reader infer more about the emotion of the story from that. At one point in the novel, Marceline talks about how critics berated her performances for having "an excess of sensibility," and that's sometimes how I felt about the book as a whole (p 54).
That said, I like how the book starts right with Marceline's voice, with the emotional heart of things, with this: "I spent the afternoon with Henri. Again the same vertigo, as though walking an exposed ridge and not knowing which side to fall on, a wild commotion in my chest." (p 1). And there are some lovely bits of detail: the "orange-colored bergère" in Henri's apartment, by the piano and the window, his tall windows and their view of the Seine, the sand strewn on the floor in the Flemish fashion in Marceline's first childhood home, the bits and moods of the cities she sees as an actress, from one city to the next. I liked this a lot:
Rochefort was tiny, and oddly laid out. It was a port, or more accurately a shipyard, differing markedly from the three towns I had previously known, casting all my points of reference to the winds. The sight of masts suddenly rising at the end of a street astonished me. I could never get used to seeing a ship between two houses. I was intrigued, charmed, and vaguely frightened. (p 60)
And this:
Bordeaux appealed to me. With its medieval aspect, its tree-planted alleys, its big, red-tiled, white-stone buildings, its high, clear windows, its sumptuous townhouses, its wrought-iron balconies, it looked something like the Spain that was so much talked of. The air was soft, the sun generous. As a girl from the north, I felt every morning as though I were entering a veil of light. (p 66)
I wanted more of that, more about place, more about light, more about streets and buildings, which isn't quite to say less of Marceline herself. I do like the idea of self-invention and self-reinvention, telling stories as a way to make sense of things, Marceline saying, of herself at a young age, "already I was learning to retell my life" (p 89). But though I would say I enjoyed this book well enough, it didn't really resonate with me as much as I thought it might.
October 25, 2012
Not impressed.
January 28, 2017
Don't remember this at all.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews