THE QUEEN’S EMBROIDERER

A TRUE STORY OF PARIS, LOVERS, SWINDLERS, AND THE FIRST STOCK MARKET CRISIS

JOAN DEJEAN

Bloomsbury, 375pp, £30

Set in the reign of Louis XIV and the regency of Louis XV, during which France sought to finance its programme of European conquest, first through punitive taxation and later through financial speculation, this book tells the story of two upwardly mobile families, the Magoulets and Chevrots. The ‘plot and the sub-plots that follow, all uncovered by Dejean, a historian of early modern France, while foraging in archives in Paris, make up an entertaining real-life family melodrama worthy of Balzac or Dickens,’ wrote Andrew Hussey in the Financial Times. ‘She winds back in time to reveal that Père Magoulet is only the latest in a long line of chancers who make up the Magoulet family. She also uncovers the history of the Chevrot family who, it turns out to no one’s surprise, are as equally steeped in villainy as the Magoulets…the result is a convincing recreation of a feverish period in French history when lying and treachery were the most useful and acceptable tactics in the art of social climbing.’ Although ‘the narrative too often veers from one time frame to another, leaving the reader disoriented, confused or frustrated’, Dejean has written ‘a fascinating and original book’.

In the Literary Review, Jane Moore reached much the same conclusion. Dejean’s ‘command of the period and the most minute details of its social, cultural and economic life is masterful, ranging from a meticulous analysis of the crime rapt de séduction to descriptions of conditions at Paris’s grim women’s workhouse and prison, La Salpêtrière, and of the new fashion among rich gentlemen for slim leather wallets to carry cash or stock certificates rather than coin, which became magnets for enterprising pickpockets.’ But ‘the tale she relates, with its numerous characters, often with the same name, jumping across two centuries, is fiendishly difficult to follow’. Turning it into ‘a potent narrative would require the skills of a novelist as well as those of a historian’.