The Last Love: A New Translation
Sylvestre is fifty years old, a philosopher, and, he believes, a reasonable man. He has made himself penniless by one marriage and is traveling through the Swiss Valais toward a fresh start in Italy when he stops at the farm of Jean Morgeron and meets Jean's half-sister F licie - a proud, intelligent woman of thirty who has been ostracized by her community for a single transgression committed in youth. He also meets Tonino, a young man of ambiguous status who seems, to Sylvestre's increasingly uneasy eye, to stand in some charged relation to F licie.
Sylvestre falls in love. Against his better judgment he marries her. And then, as the novel's opening frame tells us it will, his love curdles into obsession, and his response to betrayal - real or imagined - is not rage but something far colder: the systematic withdrawal of intimacy, the philosopher's revenge, methodical and merciless.
Published in 1866, The Last Love was written just ten days after the death of Alexandre Manceau, Sand's companion of fifteen years and the great love of her later life. It is dedicated to Gustave Flaubert, and the dedication earns itself: this is a Flaubertian novel, precise, ironic, and devastating in its refusal to judge its narrator outright. Sylvestre tells his own story fluently and at length, and he is wrong about nearly everything. The letter that F licie writes - a single document that briefly breaks through Sylvestre's narration - gives the reader the woman's own voice, her own account of desire and despair, and it changes everything.
At sixty-two, Sand was one of the most celebrated writers in Europe and one of the most radical. Her treatment of female desire in this novel - frank, compassionate, and entirely without the moralistic punishment that convention demanded - was as bold as anything she had written in her youth. The Last Love is among her least-known works and among her most searching: a late masterpiece about jealousy, self-deception, and the terrible cost of loving badly.
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