In July 1891, Arthur Rimbaud returns from Africa seriously ill. The furious poet decides to spend the last days of his life with his sister Isabelle. How can we explain this reconciliation? The mystery remains... Hospitalized in Marseille, he is at the end of his rope, with no strength left. The infection in his leg is so severe that it has to be amputated. To convalesce, he has no choice but to return to Charleville, to his childhood home. His mother, the terrible and ferocious Vitalie, hardly speaks to him through the long weeks of his agony. It is Isabelle, his young sister, who welcomes him, cares for him, comforts him. She goes with him when he decides against all reason to return to Africa. It is in her arms that he dies in Marseille on 10 November 1891.Since there is no evidence about what happened and what was said between the brother and the sister during those weeks, Philippe Besson has decided to invent it, and has chosen Isabelle's point of view to tell the tale. It is an audacious risk that succeeds. Through the pages of a fictitious private diary, he presents an indirect and tragic portrait of a woman overshadowed by her brilliant and scandalous brother. Devoted until the poet's last breath, Isabelle conscientiously collects his final confessions about his life, his loves, his poetry. But what does she understand, this virgin steeped in religion? And does she already know that she will betray him, later, when it comes time to take care of posterity? Torn between her love and her doubts, her admiration and her frustrations, Besson's Isabelle gradually appears as the sacrificial figure in the mythical struggle between the poet and his mother.

After the success of A Boy from Italy, the film adaptation of His Brother by Patrice Chéreau, the 2003 RTL-Lire grand prize for Late Autumn, and the numerous translations of his books, Philippe Besson confirms his precocious rise to prominence.