Valentine de Saint-Point (1875–1953)

Valentine de Sainte-Point was the pseudonym of Anne-Jeanne-Valentine-Marianne Desglans de Cessiat-Vercell, born in Lyon, France, the only child of Alice Desglans de Cessiat and her husband Charles-Joseph Vercell. Through her mother, she was a great-grandniece of Alphonse de Lamartine. In 1883, her father died, and her mother returned to her native Mâcon with her 8-year-old daughter. In 1893, at about age 18, Valentine married Florian Théophile Perrenot, a professor 14 years her senior. The following year, he was appointed to Lons-le-Saunier in the Jura region, where Valentine met Charles Dumont, a professor colleague and future minister of the Third Republic, who would become her lover and later her second husband. Perrenot died in 1899, and Valentine moved to Paris, where she married Dumont in 1900 and hosted a popular Belle Époque salon frequented by Gabriele D'Annunzio, Rachilde, Natalie Clifford Barney, Erik Satie, and Auguste Rodin, for whom she posed, among others. She published numerous novels, collections of poetry, plays, articles, and essays. She was one of the first Futurist women writers and made her impact on the movement with The Manifesto of Futurist Women (1912) and The Manifesto of Lust (1913). These writings, translated throughout Europe, caused a sensation. The exploration of the role of women in art and the search for a female aesthetic were constants in Valentine's work. She developed innovative ideas on theater and dance, which would eventually become La Métachorie, a live performance she called "a total fusion of the arts." After the outbreak of World War I, Valentine joined the Red Cross, worked in Spain, and then sailed for the USA. In 1917, she presented La Métachorie at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Back in Paris after the war, she felt the world she had known was gone, and gradually became alienated from her homeland. Like her ancestor Lamartine, she felt drawn to the East. In Cairo, Egypt, in 1930, she befriended fellow French author René Guenon. She studied Islam and took the Arabic name Ruhiyya Nur al-Din.