Désirée is enchanted by the young officer, and he asks her to marry him. But he must leave for Paris, where he meets his eventual wife Josephine. A heartbroken Désirée is unsure she'll ever find anyone again. A love story, but so much more, Désirée is the tale of a simple merchant's daughter who ends up with a kind of royalty she never expected: an unforgettable story just waiting to be reborn.

    It is three hundred years since it was actively at war with its traditional enemy two days' sail across the water, the savage land of Farghestan - a slumbering but by no means extinct volcano. The narrator of this story, Aldo, a world-weary young aristocrat, is posted to the coast of Syrtes, where the Admiralty keeps the seas constantly patrolled to defend the demarcation between the two powers still officially at war. His duties are to be the eyes and ears of the Signory, to report back any rumours of interest to the State. Goaded, however, by his mistress, Vanessa Aldobrandi, he takes a patrol boat across the boundary to within cannon-shot of the Farghestani coastal batteries. The age-old undeclared truce is no more than a boil ripe to be lanced.

    Here, Christianity's foremost existentialist of the twentieth century gives us a prodigious personal insight on 'man on the way' that will reinforce and commend our own pilgrimages in hope.

    As in all of Blanchot's intensely subjective fiction, the true subject of the work is the narrator's consciousness and the process by which his tale emerges through its telling. Powerfully affected by the slightest of events, the narrator responds with a violence that, most disturbingly, appears inevitable.

    The Vichy régime suppressed the book, ordering 8000 copies to be burned; as a result the work was virtually unknown in its native land until reprinted in '70. Its reputation was already secure in the English-speaking world, however, since the English translation, The Coming of the French Revolution ('39) had established it as a clear, yet subtle, classic. It remains the definitive explanation of the Marxist interpretation of the causes of the Revolution. His seminal work, La Révolution Française (revised edition, '51) was translated into English as 2 volumes: The French Revolution from its Origins to 1793 ('62-4) & The French Revolution from 1793 to 1799 ('64).

    One of the finest and most revered poets of the twentieth century, Goll receives the tender treatment he deserves in these remarkably vivid and masterful translations."—Keith Flynn, author of The Golden Ratio and The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and MemoryThis is the first English translation of the last poems of Yvan Goll, one of the twentieth century's finest European poets.