Asylum for the Queen

By Mildred Jordan

Book Overview

From the jacket: This novel of conflicting loyalties is based on an exciting, mysterious, and still unsolved episode in French-American history. The time is that of the French Revolution. the story that of a group of passionately loyal aristocrats who plot to rescue Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, and the Dauphin, their son, from imprisonment in Paris, and to bring them to a Pennsylvania colony - fittingly named Asylum until they can return to France in triumph. Mildred Jordan centers her story in handsome young Pierre de Michelait, whom we first meet at Versailles giving himself over to the easy conquest of the great ladies of the court. Here is a sensuous picture of the last lush, fantastically exotic days of the Bourbons; of intrigues amorous and political, of extravagant entertainment and of the engulfing tide of the Terror. After Pierre's escape to Asylum, where, amid silks and satins. slaves and snobbery, in all the grandeur possible in the New World. a miniature Versailles has been set up; the story concerns itself with the plots and counterplots of royalists and revolutionaries to rescue the royal family and to thwart that rescue. But this is also the story of Pierre, his love. and his transformation. There is Angelique, with whom he spends one wild and violently sadistic tight; Sylvie, the doll-like danseuse of the Opera: Victoire, for whom he develops a relationship of mixed repulsion and attraction; and Nicole, whom, in the end he returns to France to find.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B000ETUM96
• Release Date: January 1948
• Publisher: A. A. Knopf
• Length: 446 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.