The author has conducted extensive research to paint a portrait of Monville and place him in the context of the political, social and artistic movements at the end of the 18th century.

The pages of this book are populated with Monville's friends and acquaintances. The reader will discover princes and paupers, playwrights and prostitutes, philosophers and pirates, ambassadors and actresses, feminists and Freemasons. The author also focuses on the Americans living in Paris at the end of the 18th century—including four future presidents of the United States—who traveled in the circles Monville frequented.

Many celebrities were Monville's guests at his sumptuous Paris townhouse or at his country estate, the Désert de Retz, at Chambourcy, with its unique Column House, considered "the most interesting building of the eighteenth century."

The text is enhanced with three engravings of the Désert de Retz by Constant Bourgeois dating from 1808. A hitherto unpublished poem by Beaumarchais dedicated to Monville is included in an appendix.

This new edition incorporates additional anecdotes from the life of Monville, recounted by his contemporaries and unpublished for over a century. The index has been expanded to twelve pages and the bibliography now contains over three score references.

Praise for the first edition of Monville: Forgotten Luminary of the French Enlightenment

A reader in the United States: “The ironic last sentence was perfect. One thing for sure is that I'm even more determined to visit the Desert because of the book. What an incredibly interesting man and what a life."


Readers in France: “Je voulais vous dire toute mon admiration pour le travail fabuleux que vous avez effectué ainsi que pour la qualité de cette œuvre que je parcours avec le plus grand intérêt.”

“Votre livre est pétri de tendresse pour la France.”


A reader in the United Kingdom: “You are giving me lots of micro-biographies of people I'd never heard of and therefore ought not to be interested in; logically I should be bored stiff, but in fact not at all. Don't know how you do it but the damn thing is highly readable!”


A reader in Mexico: "I finished your wonderful book yesterday and I am truly delighted. I really adored it! It was like a trip in Time and Space. I could imagine myself in those places with the people you talk about."

The dictionary defines "divagation" as a wandering or a digression. Therefore many of the poems in this collection evoke the author's voyages that have taken him to forty-seven countries around the world.

Divagations is also a virtual handbook of poetic forms ranging from the elegance of the Spenserian Stanza to free verse. There are ballads and ballades, odes and ottava rima, rondels and rondeaux. Like many English-language poets, the author has a fondness for the sonnet; included is a sequence of twenty-four love sonnets. He has also included three sestinas, one in French. A long, narrative poem in blank verse recounts the adventures of one Poor Fisher, who travels to the Caribbean and attempts to establish a new religion with himself as its prophet.

Ronald W. Kenyon studied English literature at the University of Michigan and Stanford and became familiar with the entire history of English poetry, from Anglo-Saxon alliteration to the modernism of William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound; this entire legacy has left its mark on his poetry. The reader will also find allusions to modern Spanish-language poets, notably Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Lorca.

Included in an appendix are extensive annotations by Catherine Jagor, a Paris-based poet who has known the author for over a quarter of a century and is intimately familiar with his work.

"After reading this collection, you will be changed, enriched and inspired." Jean-Pierre Collet, author of Le Chant du Naïf and Harmonies.

Some of the persons in the portraits are recognizable; among them are celebrities living and dead, some named and some nameless. Basketball player Tony Parker’s portrait appears as well as that of Marilyn Monroe. Three French film stars, Lætitia Casta, Sophie Marceau and Monica Bellucci, share a triptych. Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s wife and model Aline Charigot, Alphonsine Fournaise, the actress Angèle and the Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte populate a four-panel polyptych. The Chevalier de Saint George, an 18th century composer and equestrian, appears, as well as the Lady of the Unicorn from the medieval tapestry. Portraits of Agnès Sorel, mistress of French King Charles VII, and Madame Tallien, la plus grande putain de Paris, grace these pages. Superman’s here too, appearing as Brandon Routh. and so is the late Jean Gabin. Some of the portraits are anonymous.

Everyone is free to guess who’s who.