Cirrus@Austlit

'In the second book of Anjou Trilogy, the reader shares the exciting and sometimes bizarre events – and people – of the last decades of the eighteenth century. The British Prime Minister, the Duke of Grafton, is spending more time at the races at Newmarket and in the arms of his mistress than he is in attending to important matters of State. The conflict between Britain and the American colonies leads to the war for independence. In France, the young Marie-Antoinette is having a humiliating seven years of unconsummated marriage with the sexually inadequate Louis XVI – and the teen-aged Corsican, Buonaparte, graduates from l’École Militaire in Paris.

'On the other side of the Rhine, in the squalid Frankfurt ghetto, the soon to be famous Jewish coin dealer, Mayer Rothschild and his family are eking out a miserable existence in a city of rampant racial discrimination. And back in Paris, having been found guilty of the theft of the fabulously valuable ‘Queen’s Necklace’, the scheming Countess Jeanne Lamotte Valois is publicly stripped naked, whipped and branded. The book ends with the storming of the Bastille and the onset of the ‘Reign of Terror’ that followed in its wake.' (Publication summary)