Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
born
June 30, 1786, Douai, Fr.
died July 23, 1859, Paris
French poet and woman of letters of the
Romantic period.
Her
family was ruined by the French
Revolution and moved to the French
colony of Guadeloupe. She returned to
Paris upon her mother’s death,
supporting herself by acting at the
Opéra-Comique and the Odéon. She married
a second-rate actor, Prosper Lanchantin,
called Valmore.
When
illness threatened her stage voice,
Desbordes-Valmore turned to writing. Her
poetry—Pauvres Fleurs (1839; “Poor
Flowers”), Les Pleurs (1833; “The
Tears”), and Bouquets et prières (1843;
“Bouquets and Prayers”)—is poignant and
elegiac and concerns religion, sadness,
death, and the author’s love for her
daughters and her native Douai. Her
prose work L’Atelier d’un peintre (1833;
“A Painter’s Studio”) is
autobiographical. The poet Charles
Baudelaire esteemed her writing, and
Paul Verlaine admitted his debt to her,
giving her a place in his revised
edition of Les Poètes maudits (1888;
“The Damned [or Maligned] Poets”).
