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Zusatztext “ The Knight of Maison-Rouge is one of those rare gifts that are all too seldom found in the book world. A work once thought lost in the dustbins of a shuttered store is rediscovered . . . brought out to the front of the shop for all to see and grasp. With this fresh and vibrant novel now reclaimed, the heroic Maurice and Lorin will soon be placed in the vaunted ranks of other Dumas stalwarts—from Dantès to D’Artagnan and the rest of the glorious Musketeers.” —from the Introduction by Lorenzo Carcaterra “Dumas seduces, fascinates, entertains, and instructs. His works are so diverse, so varied, so alive, so charming, so powerful; they radiate that light that is so peculiar to France.” — Victor Hugo Informationen zum Autor Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) è stato un prolifico scrittore francese noto per i suoi romanzi storici d'avventura. Le sue opere, tra cui I tre moschettieri e Il conte di Montecristo, sono celebri per la ricchezza della narrazione e per i temi senza tempo della giustizia e della vendetta. Klappentext A major new translation of a forgotten classic Paris, 1793, the onset of the Terror. Brave Republican Maurice rescues a mys-terious and beautiful woman from an angry mob and is unknowingly drawn into a secret Royalist plot—a plot revolving around the imprisoned Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, and her enigmatic and fearless champion, the Knight of Maison-Rouge. Full of surprising twists, breakneck adventure, conspiracies, swordplay, romance, and heroism, The Knight of Maison-Rouge is an exhilarating tale of selflessness, love, and honor under the shadow of the guillotine. Dumas here is at the very height of his powers, and with this first and only modern translation, readers can once again ride with the Knight of Maison-Rouge. Leseprobe 1 The Recruits It was the night of the tenth of March, 1793. The bell at Notre-Dame had just struck ten, and each stroke rang out clear and distinct, one after the other, before flying off into the ether like a night bird soaring from some bronze nest, sad, monotonous, and resonant. Night had descended on Paris. But it was not the usual noisy, stormy Paris night, punctuated by lightning yet cold and misty. Paris itself was not the Paris we know today, dazzling by night with its thousands of lights reflected in its golden mire, the Paris of busy promeneurs, jubilant whisperings, and deliciously sleazy outskirts where fierce feuds and reckless crimes flourish, a wildly roaring furnace. It was a shabby little dive, tremulous, beetling, whose rarely seen inhabitants would run whenever they had to cross a street and scuttle away into their alleyways or under their porte-cochères, the way feral creatures pursued by hunters sink into their burrows. It was, in a word, the Paris of the tenth of March, 1793, as I think I might have said. But first let me tell you a little bit about the extreme situation that made the capital so different from what it is today, and then we can start on the events that are the whole point of this story. With the death of Louis XVI, France cut its ties with the rest of Europe. The three enemies it had already defeated—Prussia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire,and Piedmont—were then joined by England, Holland, and Spain. Sweden and Denmark alone maintained their former neutrality, busy as they were watching Catherine II tear up Poland, as it happens. The situation was alarming. Less looked down upon as a physical force, but also less esteemed as a moral one, since the September massacres and the execution of Louis XVI on the twenty-first of January, France was literally surrounded, like a mere town, by the whole of Europe. England was at the coast, Spain along the Pyrenees, Piedmont and Austria across the Alps, Holland and Prussia to the north of the Netherlands, and at one single point, at Escaut, along the Upper Rhine, two hundred fif...
