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I originally picked this book up because it promised to cover precisely the material (Royalist resistance against Napoleon between 1800 and 1802) for my current fanfic that I was having trouble sourcing much information on elsewhere. It wasn't particularly helpful in that respect, probably because there really wasn't very much useful resistance going on at that point -- but its very existence is an interesting phenomenon in itself. Unfortunately that doesn't make it a terribly good book, especially considering its inordinate length: 750 pages in paperback plus extra editorial material.
As a long-lost novel by Alexandre Dumas (Author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo! proclaims the cover) it is, I'm afraid, little more than a historical curiosity. ( Read more... )
The youngest survivor of an aristocratic family who were all executed in turn for their Royalist activities, Hector de Sainte-Hermine takes up the cause in his turn and sacrifices the happiness of his impending marriage to renewed hostilities against an increasingly autocratic Bonaparte. He is not, however, a particularly effective guerilla and is rapidly caught, whereupon his sole hope is to follow his brothers into death without bringing further disgrace upon his unhappy fiancée. However, Fouché, the devious minister of police, contrives instead to have him forgotten in jail and finally released once Bonaparte has become the Emperor Napoleon, by which point Hector has seen the error of his ways and consents to serve the glorious new empire, giving his loyalty to France rather than to the exiled Bourbons for whom his family sacrificed their future.
And that is basically the entire plot. The rest of the novel consists of Hector under multiple aliases travelling around the fringes of history and impressing everybody with how incredibly good he is at everything -- he is supposed to be a tragically romantic figure mourning his lost love and doing his best to get himself killed, but unlike, say, Athos, who is likewise noble, handsome, reticent about his past, and emotionally scarred, he remains very much a cipher rather than engaging the reader in any way. ( Read more... )
As a long-lost novel by Alexandre Dumas (Author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo! proclaims the cover) it is, I'm afraid, little more than a historical curiosity. ( Read more... )
The youngest survivor of an aristocratic family who were all executed in turn for their Royalist activities, Hector de Sainte-Hermine takes up the cause in his turn and sacrifices the happiness of his impending marriage to renewed hostilities against an increasingly autocratic Bonaparte. He is not, however, a particularly effective guerilla and is rapidly caught, whereupon his sole hope is to follow his brothers into death without bringing further disgrace upon his unhappy fiancée. However, Fouché, the devious minister of police, contrives instead to have him forgotten in jail and finally released once Bonaparte has become the Emperor Napoleon, by which point Hector has seen the error of his ways and consents to serve the glorious new empire, giving his loyalty to France rather than to the exiled Bourbons for whom his family sacrificed their future.
And that is basically the entire plot. The rest of the novel consists of Hector under multiple aliases travelling around the fringes of history and impressing everybody with how incredibly good he is at everything -- he is supposed to be a tragically romantic figure mourning his lost love and doing his best to get himself killed, but unlike, say, Athos, who is likewise noble, handsome, reticent about his past, and emotionally scarred, he remains very much a cipher rather than engaging the reader in any way. ( Read more... )