The Lily and the Lion by Maurice Druon #ParisinJuly2025

July 24, 202515 Comments

Translated by Humphrey Hare

I always seem to forget about Paris in July, but this year I remembered in time and decided it would be the perfect opportunity to get back to Maurice Druon’s Accursed Kings series, which I started years ago and still haven’t finished! The Lily and the Lion (first published in French in 1959) is the sixth of seven books telling the story of Philip IV the Fair of France and the kings who follow him, said to have been cursed “to the thirteenth generation” by the vengeful Grand Master of the Knights Templar as he burned at the stake. Les Rois maudits, to give the series its French title, was very successful in France, being adapted for television twice, and has also been credited by George R.R. Martin as the inspiration for Game of Thrones.

The first book in the series is The Iron King and I would recommend starting there if possible. If you don’t have much knowledge of this period of French history (which I certainly didn’t), reading the books in order makes it easier to gradually understand the historical context and the relationships between the various characters. One character who has been with us since book one is Robert of Artois and his story becomes the main focus of book six.

The Lily and the Lion begins with the death of yet another French king, Charles IV. With no direct heir, his cousin Philippe of Valois is chosen as his successor, thanks largely to the machinations of Robert of Artois. In return for helping Philippe to the throne, Robert has been promised the new king’s support in reclaiming his lands of Artois which he believes have been stolen from him by his Aunt Mahaut. A large part of the book is devoted to the dispute over Artois, which is more exciting than it sounds as Robert is prepared to go to any lengths, including forgery, perjury and murder, to get what he wants – and Mahaut is equally determined to stop him.

In England, meanwhile, Philip the Fair’s daughter Isabella and her lover, Roger Mortimer, are now effectively ruling the country after deposing her husband, Edward II. However, Isabella and Edward’s son, the young Edward III, is almost old enough to take control of the throne himself and is planning to overthrow Mortimer. Thanks to some encouragement from Robert of Artois, who has lost patience with Philippe of Valois, Edward III also sets his sights on the throne of France, believing he has a claim through his mother. The seeds of the Hundred Years’ War have been sown!

For a long time, The Lily and the Lion was the last book in the series, until the publication of The King Without a Kingdom many years later in 1977. It does feel like a final book, as Druon ties up loose ends and brings his various storylines to a conclusion. I had wondered if he would return to the story of Marie de Cressay and Guccio Baglioni’s son, Jean, switched as a baby with John the Posthumous, the young King of France who supposedly died aged four days old – and he does, right at the end of the book in the epilogue. This felt very much like an afterthought, though, and I would have liked to have at least had some glimpses of Jean’s life in the main part of the novel.

Although I preferred the earlier books in the series, I did enjoy reading this one and seeing Robert and Mahaut’s long-running feud finally come to an end. I’ve heard that the final book is very different and not as good, but I’m sure I’ll read it eventually – maybe for next year’s Paris in July!

Book 12/20 for 20 Books of Summer 2025.

The Woman in the Wallpaper by Lora Jones

May 14, 20259 Comments

The French Revolution is a fascinating subject and I’ve read several novels set during that period. The Woman in the Wallpaper, Lora Jones’ debut novel, is another and is written from the unusual perspective of two sisters working at a wallpaper factory in northern France.

Sofi and Lara Thibault are the daughters of a stonemason who dies suddenly under tragic circumstances early in the book. In need of work to support themselves, the sisters and their mother move to Jouy-en-Jouvant, a town near Paris, where all three have been offered employment at the Oberst factory. The factory produces wallpaper with a unique design featuring a woman thought to be the late Mrs Oberst, who died several years ago and may or may not have been murdered. As they settle into their new jobs, both girls are drawn to Josef Oberst, the heir to the factory, but Josef is soon to be a married man, with an aristocratic young wife due to arrive from Versailles.

With political turmoil brewing in France, Sofi finds herself caught up with the revolutionaries and longs to play a part in shaping her country’s future. Lara, however, has other things to worry about – like the resemblance between herself and Mrs Oberst and the way incidents from her own life seem to be replicated in the pictures on the factory wallpaper. Meanwhile, Josef’s new wife, Hortense, discovers that as a member of the aristocracy she could be in the most danger of them all as the revolution picks up pace.

I enjoyed The Woman in the Wallpaper, although I wish authors would stop writing in present tense! I’ve never read a book set in a wallpaper factory before and it was fascinating to read about the process of making the paper and preparing the coloured pigments, as well as the work carried out in the printhouse, where the designs are carved onto the wooden blocks which are then coated with ink and pressed onto the paper. The parts of the novel dealing with the French Revolution are also interesting. Some of the key events, such as the storming of the Bastille and the arrival of the guillotine, are included, but the main focus is on the role of women and how the Revolution seemed unlikely to bring about the level of change they were hoping for.

The novel is narrated by both of the Thibault sisters and at first, even though the name of the narrator is given at the start of each chapter, I found myself forgetting which one I was reading about as their voices felt very similar. Later in the book, as their stories began to diverge, the two became easier to distinguish and this wasn’t a problem anymore. Lara is the gentler, quieter, more mature sister but Sofi, the impetuous younger sister, was my favourite. However, there’s also a third narrator – Hortense, Josef’s selfish, entitled wife from Versailles. Hortense makes no attempt to adapt to the changes in society or to endear herself to the people of Jouy; in one memorable scene, she deliberately hosts an elaborate birthday party for her pet dog, knowing that peasants are starving and workers are protesting. I thought perhaps I would warm to her as the book went on, but that didn’t happen – I found her cruel and heartless right to the end.

As for the central mystery surrounding the images in the wallpaper and their connection with Lara’s life, I found it easy to guess what was really going on, but it was still quite unsettling! This is an impressive first novel and I hope Lora Jones will be writing more.

Thanks to Sphere for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

That Dark Spring by Susannah Stapleton

May 12, 202511 Comments

One of my resolutions for 2025 was to read more non-fiction books, so I’m ashamed to say this is only my second one this year. Oh, well – I still have more than seven months to add a few more to that total. I would also like to widen the range of topics I normally choose to read about and try something different, but for now, with That Dark Spring, I have stayed within one of my usual areas for non-fiction – true crime.

The crime in question is the murder – or could it be suicide? – of Olive Branson, an Englishwoman in her forties found dead at her farmhouse in a village in Provence. This happens in April 1929, when she is discovered submerged in a water tank outside the house, a bullet wound between her eyes and a revolver nearby. The local policeman and doctor conclude that Olive shot herself, but not everyone is happy with this verdict. Back in England, Olive’s wealthy, influential cousin demands that the case be reopened, so one of France’s top detectives, Alexandre Guibbal, is summoned from Marseille to investigate.

It’s an intriguing mystery! Could Olive really have lifted the heavy cistern lid, lowered herself in and shot herself – with her left hand, despite evidence suggesting that she was right-handed? Guibbal doesn’t think so and quickly turns his attentions to François Pinet, believed to be a lover of Olive’s for whom she had changed her will to leave him the Monte Carlo Hotel, which she had recently purchased. As evidence mounts up against Pinet, he insists that he is innocent and is defended by many of the villagers who are keen to support ‘one of their own’. There’s eventually a trial, but even then a lot of questions are left unanswered. Susannah Stapleton can’t – and doesn’t – give us those answers, leaving us to draw our own conclusions and try to decide what really happened.

I enjoyed That Dark Spring overall, although it took me a while to get into it due to the amount of background information provided in the first half of the book: a history of the village of Les Baux and the Baussenc people; an account of Olive’s early life and her career as an artist; detailed descriptions of the two rival hotels in Les Baux; and a long and (as far as I could tell) irrelevant biography of the poet Frédéric Mistral. Some padding is to be expected in books of this type, of course, but I found that I only became fully engaged with the story when it returned to the central crime. There are some points that wouldn’t be out of place in a detective novel, such as where Guibbal consults an astronomer in an attempt to decide exactly when darkness fell on the night of the crime or where Pinet tries to use the sighting of a car as an alibi and becomes entangled in his own lies.

It’s frustrating that we still don’t know the truth behind Olive’s death and probably never will. If Pinet was innocent and we assume that suicide was unlikely, that must mean someone else got away with murder – but who was it? Stapleton doesn’t really steer us into one way of thinking or another; she just provides the facts and some possible theories for us to consider. She suggests that the police may have been so determined just to pin the blame on somebody that they ignored or failed to collect important evidence, leaving Pinet’s fate up to the lawyers and the jury.

Stapleton has drawn on a number of primary sources and includes excerpts from Olive Branson’s diaries and letters throughout the text, giving it a more personal touch. There are also notes at the end, a bibliography and a list of Olive’s exhibited artworks. I had never heard of Olive until now, so it’s good to have learned a little bit about her. I’ll have to go back and read Susannah Stapleton’s other book – The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective.

Thanks to Picador for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Midnight Carousel by Fiza Saeed McLynn

May 5, 2025May 5, 202513 Comments

Whenever you decide to read a book by an author who’s new to you, you never really know what to expect and there’s always a risk you won’t like it, particularly when it’s a debut novel like this one. Fortunately, I loved The Midnight Carousel from the beginning; it’s such an original, unusual story that I was completely captivated by it.

The carousel of the title is built in 1900 by Gilbert Cloutier for the Grand Exhibition in Paris. Gilbert is struggling to come to terms with his grief over the recent loss of his young son, so he decides to add some special features to the carousel in memory of the boy. This is the last thing he does before disappearing without trace. Over the years that follow, the carousel gains a sinister reputation when it becomes linked with further disappearances and Detective Laurent Bisset is asked to investigate. He thinks he has caught the culprit, but several years later history begins to repeat itself, leaving Laurent questioning whether he has made a terrible mistake.

Meanwhile, in England, Maisie Marlowe is being raised by abusive foster parents in Canvey Island, Essex. Maisie has no idea who her real parents are and the only things that sustain her through this miserable period of her life are her friendship with her foster brother and a picture of a beautiful carousel that she found on the beach. Eventually, an aunt comes to rescue her and takes her to live in the home of Sir Malcolm Randolph where she has just taken a job as housekeeper. Due to an unexpected sequence of events, Maisie ends up emigrating to America with Sir Malcolm where they open an amusement park in Chicago with a magnificent carousel as the star attraction – the exact same carousel as the one in Maisie’s picture and the same one that was built at Gilbert Cloutier’s factory in Paris.

When the disappearances begin again, Laurent Bisset is sure there must be a connection with the earlier incidents in France, so he travels to Chicago determined to uncover the truth this time. Here he crosses paths with Maisie, bringing the two threads of the novel together. I loved both characters and was interested in their personal stories – Maisie’s Dickensian childhood and her incredible change of fortune and Laurent’s dedication to making amends for his past mistakes – but I also enjoyed watching their relationship develop as they come together over the mystery of the carousel.

The mystery element of the book is not so much a whodunit as a howdunit. How can people be disappearing into thin air while riding the wooden jumping horses? Is the carousel itself haunted? Did Gilbert Cloutier place a curse on it? Is someone somehow snatching people from the horses without being seen? Although there were a few clues that I thought could and should have been noticed by Laurent and the police, I can also understand how they could have been missed. When we eventually get some answers, they are both clever and creepy and what I found particularly unsettling is that all through the book I never really knew whether I was reading magical realism or something with a more human explanation. The eerie atmosphere, along with the fairground setting, kept reminding me of Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, but I think this is a better book.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Midnight Carousel and loved getting to know Laurent, Maisie and the secondary characters – I particularly liked Mrs Papadopoulos the dairy seller and Madame Rose the fortune-teller. I’ll certainly be putting Fiza Saeed McLynn on my list of authors to look out for in the future.

Thanks to Michael Joseph for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Spitting Gold by Carmella Lowkis

June 3, 202412 Comments

In Charles Perrault’s fairy tale about two sisters, Diamonds and Toads, a fairy rewards the good sister with the ability to spit gold and punishes the bad sister with the curse of spitting toads. This is the premise at the heart of Carmella Lowkis’ new novel, Spitting Gold, a tale of two very different sisters living in 19th century Paris.

It’s 1866 and Baroness Sylvie Devereux has settled into a respectable married life, but a visit from her younger sister, Charlotte Mothe, threatens to ruin both her marriage and her reputation. For several years, Sylvie and Charlotte had worked together as spiritualists, conning grieving victims out of large sums of money, but Sylvie has promised her husband that those days are behind her and her sister is no longer part of her life. Now, though, Charlotte is begging Sylvie to join her for one last job and Sylvie finds it impossible to refuse, knowing that Charlotte needs the money to pay their father’s medical bills.

Several members of the wealthy de Jacquinot family believe they are being haunted by the spirit of a great-aunt, who was brutally murdered during the French Revolution, leaving behind a hidden treasure. The Mothe sisters agree to help lay the ghost to rest and begin to use every trick and deception at their disposal to convince the family that they are making contact with the spirit. Everything seems to be going well, until the ghost appears to start targeting the sisters themselves. Is the de Jacquinot house really haunted or is there another explanation for what is happening?

There seems to be a current trend for historical novels about mediums and séances; I can think of several I’ve read just in the last year or so, including Lucy Barker’s The Other Side of Mrs Wood and Ambrose Parry’s Voices of the Dead. What makes this one different is the structure and the idea of using two sisters to give alternate views of the same story – the first half of the book is narrated by Sylvie and the second half by Charlotte. I’m not sure how well this worked for me; it was interesting to see things from two such different perspectives, but by the time Charlotte’s narrative began I had become so absorbed in Sylvie’s story I struggled to adjust to a change of narrator.

Apart from the references to the French Revolution, I felt that the book lacked the strong sense of time and place I prefer and at times I even forgot that I was reading a story set in 19th century Paris and not Victorian London. I did love the good sister/bad sister theme, though – while at first it seems obvious that Sylvie is the good one and Charlotte the bad, as the novel continues we learn that things are not that simple and that we shouldn’t rely on just one point of view to give us the full picture. As a debut novel it was quite entertaining, with some interesting twists; I’m not sure whether I’ll read more books by Carmella Lowkis, but I could be tempted!

Thanks to Doubleday for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 19/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

The Black Count by Tom Reiss

May 29, 202410 Comments

My second non-fiction review this month, The Black Count is a biography of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, father of the French author Alexandre Dumas. I’ve always loved Dumas’ novels (he’s most famous for The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, one of my all-time favourite books), so The Black Count appealed to me as soon as I heard about it on its publication in 2012. I’ve no idea why it has taken me so long to actually pick it up and read it!

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, usually referred to in the book as Alex, was born in 1762 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in the Caribbean. He was the son of a French aristocrat, the Marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, and a freed slave woman, Marie-Cesette Dumas. After the death of his mother, the young Alex, along with his three siblings, was temporarily sold into slavery by his father in order to pay their passage back to France. Eventually the Marquis bought Alex back (but not the other three children, who remained in slavery and are lost to history) and took him home to France where he was educated in fencing, horse riding and all the other skills befitting the son of a nobleman.

When the Marquis remarried, however, Alex was left to fend for himself and he joined the French military, taking his mother’s surname of Dumas. Playing an important role in the French Revolutionary Wars, he quickly rose through the ranks and by the age of thirty-two was General-in-Chief of the French Army of the Alps, commanding 53,000 men. Later, on a campaign to Egypt, Alex clashed with another powerful general, Napoleon Bonaparte, and from there his career took a downward spiral. Today, Napoleon remains one of the most well known historical figures of all time, but Alex Dumas has been largely forgotten. The Black Count is an attempt to give Dumas the attention he deserves and make his story known to a modern audience.

General Alex Dumas was clearly a fascinating man, yet I have to be completely honest and say that I was slightly disappointed by this book. It was described as a thrilling real life adventure story, as exciting as one of Dumas’ novels, which I think raised my expectations too high. For me, there was too much focus on military history, with details of campaigns, battles and tactics, along with lots of general information on the French Revolution, with Alex Dumas himself being pushed into the background for large sections of the book. Of course, other readers will find this much more interesting than I did, but military life is never going to be one of my personal favourite subjects to read about and I have read about the Revolution many times before. I did quite enjoy the chapter about the Army of the Alps, though, where Alex and his men scaled the icy cliffs of Mont Cenis to capture a mountain pass; as Reiss points out, the cold must have come as a shock to a man who grew up in the Caribbean!

All of Alex Dumas’ achievements are very impressive, but most impressive of all is the fact that he was able to rise as high as he did as a person of colour in the 18th century. In some ways it was the perfect time and place for him to succeed because it was a surprisingly tolerant period in French history; a century later racial prejudices and the removal of rights for black people would have prevented him from reaching the same heights. At the time of Alex’s arrival in France, however, a decree known as the Code Noir was in place which gave freed slaves the same rights and privileges as white people. Add to that Alex’s renowned strength, courage and leadership skills and it’s easy to see how he was able to accomplish so much and even rival Napoleon for a while.

Tom Reiss occasionally tells us about his visits to museums and archives where he saw documents and paintings which informed his writing of the book. He also draws on a large number of other sources, which are listed at the end in a bibliography, the most notable being the writings of Alexandre Dumas (the author), who wrote about his father in his memoirs and several of his other non-fiction books. Reiss also suggests that some famous scenes from Dumas’ novels were based on his father’s adventures – for example, in 1799 Alex was captured and thrown into a dungeon in the Kingdom of Naples for two years, something which surely inspired the imprisonment of Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo.

Although I expected to love The Black Count more than I did, I do feel that I’ve learned a lot from it, both about France in the second half of the 18th century and about Alex Dumas himself. He was an amazing man and deserves to be better known; I’m sure this book, in the twelve years since it was published, will have gone some way towards achieving that.

Farewell, the Tranquil Mind by RF Delderfield

May 17, 202317 Comments

Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!

These lines from Othello inspired the title of Ronald Frederick Delderfield’s 1950 novel about a period of history that was anything but tranquil – the French Revolution. Having loved Delderfield’s A Horseman Riding By trilogy (which begins with Long Summer Day), I’ve been keen to read more of his books. This one wouldn’t necessarily have been my first choice – it’s currently out of print and with very few reviews online – but I came across a copy in a charity shop and thought I would give it a try.

Farewell, the Tranquil Mind is narrated by David Treloar, a young man from a family of Devon smugglers. From an early age, David has been different from the other male Treloars; while his brothers work with their father, bringing in shipments of contraband cargo, David stays at home and helps his mother run the family farm, Westdown. He is also the only one who has learned to read and write, having been taken under the wing of the agent, Saxeby, who introduces him to French politics through Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. However, when a smuggling operation goes wrong and an exciseman is shot dead, the blame falls on David and he is forced to flee England.

Arriving in France in the middle of the Revolution, he is befriended by André Lamotte, the nephew of a Parisian wigmaker and perfumier known as Papa Rouzet. It is through his friendship with André and the Rouzet family that David becomes involved with various revolutionary groups including the Brissotins and the Cordeliers – and falls in love with Charlotte, Rouzet’s niece. With the situation in France becoming increasingly dangerous, David and Charlotte consider escaping to England – but not only is David still wanted for the murder of Exciseman Vetch, the English also now suspect him of being a French spy.

I found this book interesting, but certainly not as enjoyable as the Horseman Riding By trilogy, and I can see why it hasn’t been reissued like most of his other novels. The blurb made it sound quite exciting – and it is, in places, but in between there’s lots of exposition and political detail and this slows the plot down, making it less entertaining than I’d expected. Despite having read other books set during the French Revolution, I had to concentrate to keep track of all the different groups and who was on which side. It wasn’t just a case of royalists versus republicans; within the republican movement there were many separate factions – as well as the two I’ve mentioned above, there were Jacobins, Girondins, Montagnards, Dantonists and several others, each with their own ideas on the goals of the Revolution and how the country should be run.

I liked David, but I felt that Charlotte’s role in the book was too small and understated for me to get a clear sense of who she was or what she was like and this meant that I didn’t feel fully invested in the romance element of the book. It’s disappointing when I think of how well defined even the minor characters were in the other books of Delderfield’s I’ve read. This novel was written very early in his career, though, which maybe explains why it doesn’t feel as accomplished. It’s worth hunting down and reading if you’re particularly interested in learning more about the political side of the French Revolution, but otherwise probably not the best place to start with Delderfield! I’m still looking forward to reading more of his books and would welcome any suggestions as to which one I should read next.