The regency of Philippe d'Orléans, the Cellamare plot, and a Breton conspirator who walks into Paris with a letter he must not lose. Dumas wrote it in 1841, before the musketeer novels, and worked the real trial records into the plot. The love story and the conspiracy are wound together so that the girl's every kindness tightens the noose. Fifty-three plates of Watteau's fêtes galantes and Canaletto's Venetian canals summon the gilded, conspiratorial Europe through which d'Harmental moves.
The regency of Philippe d'Orléans, the Cellamare plot, and a Breton conspirator who walks into Paris with a letter he must not lose. Dumas wrote it in 1841, before the musketeer novels, and worked the real trial records into the plot. The love story and the conspiracy are wound together so that t...