Fiorinda the Fair (Translated): A Novel of Court Francis II

- A new English translation of Zévaco's 1920 novelThe king is sixteen. His mother has decided he will not see seventeen.Paris, 1560. Francis II sits on the throne of France with Mary Stuart beside him, the Guises at his shoulder, and his mother watching from the next room. Catherine de' Medici has a second son she prefers, a baron who kills to order, and all the patience in the world.Between her and the crown stand two men and a girl who tells fortunes.Beaurevers, son of the astrologer Nostradamus, will walk into any trap in Paris provided somebody remembers to close the door behind him. Ferrière is in love with Fiorinda, and does not yet know that he has been betrothed - without being asked, and without being told - to another woman entirely. And Fiorinda keeps a few grains of powder sewn into her dress, because she has learned what the Queen Mother does to people who become inconvenient.What follows is trapdoors and poison; a signed order that turns on the position of a single full stop; four starving swordsmen who would follow their captain into hell for a hot supper and the chance to be insolent to their betters; and a powder mine under a blockhouse on the Pré-aux-Clercs.Michel Zévaco - the rival Dumas never quite shook offAn anarchist journalist turned master of the swashbuckler, Zévaco wrote the cloak-and-dagger serials that gripped Belle Époque France. Jean-Paul Sartre called him a writer of genius. Millions have read him in Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Romanian and Spanish. In English he has been almost entirely unavailable - until now.The Zévaco Project is translating the whole of him, novel by novel, into modern English: one translator, one voice, no footnotes, no scholarly apparatus. Faithful to the plot, the characters and the events, but written to be read for pleasure by somebody who does not speak a word of French.For readers of Alexandre Dumas, Rafael Sabatini, Paul Féval and Arturo Pérez-Reverte.Fiorinda the Fair is complete in itself. No previous volume required.