On Monday, the 18th of August, 1572, there was a splendid festival at the Louvre. We also get a massacre, secret romances, murder, imprisonment, friendship, changing alliances, secret passageways, eavesdropping, clandestine meetings and religious conversions. As soon as the poisons start flying though, you know there will be an unintended victim and near misses. She employs a purfumier which is really just a nice way to say poisoner.
His mother Catherine is also a master manipulator and isn’t happy now Charles is ruling independently.
He just plots for himself, and he will treat his friends as enemies, or take his enemies for friends, as he thinks it may be advantageous to him.” That pretty much goes for all of them and Charles does a good job of getting his brothers out of the way by giving them lesser crowns. He has never made friends, because he neither loves nor hates. His sister Margot describes Francis as “cunning and cold. Dumas keeps Francis alive even though he was king and died before Charles, who is king in the novel, ascends to the throne. The sheer amount of lies and manipulation is staggering. As you might suspect, at the heart of the plot is the succession to the throne of France and all the jousting and jockeying that goes into getting it. I nearly drew myself a quick family tree because damn, everyone is related to everyone else and it’s crazy. Once I got the hang of the French names and titles it was a breeze. There is some embroidery and speculation (did Catherine poison Henry of Navarre’s mother Jeanne?) but the bare bones of the succession, religious turmoil and court drama is factual.
And in the French court, murder helps, too.Because this is based on real people Queen Catherine de Medici and her many sons, plus wives, girlfriends and hangers-on, I did some fact-checking to see how close Dumas got it. No one gets and keeps power without a little skulduggery on the side. Yes, I know this is fiction, true historical fiction since it it set almost 200 years before it was written, but darn if it doesn’t ring true to some extent. You think you know scheming, backstabbing, double dealing and treachery? You don’t know anything compared to the French aristocracy.
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