The French feminist journal, La Fronde, was a groundbreaking publication in that it was both staffed and run by women, but also dared to pay them equally to men in similar role.  From 1897 to 1905 it burned brightly, achieving a print circulation which before then had seemed impossible for a publication written entirely by women.  It didn’t survive, likely because it was too radical: not only was it devoted to the equality of women, it also took further risks, such as dating the newspaper by the French Revolutionary Calendar, the Jewish calendar and the Gregorian. 

One of the contributors to the newspaper was May Armand Blanc, a woman who died young and whose identity remains somewhat shrouded even today.  May Armand Blanc (sometimes May Armand-blanc) published many short stories and novels in her mid to late twenties, before dying at thirty.  Illness tinges these works, though they are not obsessed with sickness.

The collection The Last Rendezvous, published by Snuggly Books, and translated by Brian Stableford, collects many of these short works in a sporty 350-page book.  The first story, also titled The Last Rendezvous, is brief, passionate, and hopeless.  It is the dying embers of love, a love where the woman wants to continue the relationship while knowing the man does not. 

The cruelty of the infinite minutes when she had watched out for him, always having arrived first, appeared to her at that moment as the greatest happiness.  She appealed to him very softly by his name: “Georges!” and suddenly desired to flee without every seeing him again: to flee the determined place to which he was goign to come, the city where they might encounter one another, and the land where he lived – to flee herself, and her cowardly heart, which loved him so much.

She knows it is over, she knows her time with him is done, but she clings to the last remaining hour as though frenzied.  This is beyond reason or passion, and in her last efforts to hold on to Georges he discovers in her something distasteful, even ugly.  They have agreed to meet on a cold night in Paris, him begrudgingly, her desparate.  It is immediately clear that in his mind, an hour really meant a couple of minutes, and in her mind, it meant forever.  The writing is dark in tone, and there is an undercurrent of menance, as though the whole interaction was balancing on a knife’s edge.  At any moment violence could appear, unlikely from him, but possible from Catherine – if she can’t have him, no-one can.

He kissed her softly.  Then she lifted her veil and gave him profound kisses that wanted to devour the flesh and drink the soul of that being, in the desolate fury of the impossible.

This is a short piece – a couple of pages.  Georges is distant and unknowable, with none of Catherine’s thoughts or exclamations helping to explain why she loves him so.  Perhaps he is a cypher, a blank slate filled in by her desire to love someone.  Perhaps not.  We don’t know.  What we see is the end of something, and it is sad and miserable and pathetic.

The Last Rendezvous is a short story by French writer May Armand Blanc