This Story take place at the end of the Directoire in 1799, France. Napoleon is ruling as the only one consulat and this time will mark the end of the french revolution. In the department of Brittany and Vendée, in the west of France, many christian royalist are still refusing the new governement, staying loyal to the monarchy and the King. The governement send the police to exterminate these people, that we call "Chouans". In this book we follow the love story between two characters, the Marquis de Montauran, a royalist and Mademoiselle de Verneuil a republican sent to help kill him.
╰┈➤ Review: [Warning; Spoiler]
This book was given to me by my brother, and i have to admit i wasn't shure i would like it. Despite the very long descriptions of, well, everything (which i was expecting), this was actually...good? The story was interesting, i don't think i was ever bored while reading it, and most of the characters were very well-writen, especially Marie de Verneuil, which was my favorite character.
Knowing it was written in the 19th century, i wasn't expecting such a good femal characters, she's strong, funny and smart and quite modern for her time. What makes her an even better character is that she's not perfect, she commit a lots of mistakes but learn from them and grow as a person along the story. Her love affair with the marquis was the most entertaining thing i have read in a while, the number of times they betray and try to kill each other is almost funny, i lost it when she tried to stab him.
But talking about the marquis, i must say that i didn't really like his character. I thought he was kind of empty if that make sense. We know very little of him in comparaison to the other characters. We can guess the personality of the other characters with what is given to us in the book, but it's really hard with the Marquis, i had the impression that he was a little useless to his cause, to be honest, which he is not since he's someone important, but it's what the book shows us. The lady accompagning him, Madame du Gua, was much more interesting in my opinion and i wish we knew more about her too.
There is a second love story in this book, between Francine, the lady in waiting of Marie, and Marche-à-terre, or Pierre. I wanted to know more, so much more. We learn in the second part of the book that they used to be lovers (we don't know if they were married, i'm guessing they were) but Pierre left her to become a "hunter of the king", which are royalist fighting for a monarchy. I think they were together for 8 years before he decided to leave. It honeslty broke my heart, because they still loved each other but were from different world which kept them apart. Something that stuck with me was when they meet again for the first time and she tells him that no matter what, for him, the king will always be more important than her. I wish i could have hug her.
The ending did left me hanging, everything happend very fast. But i thought it was good, not exeptional, but not bad. Marie sacrificing herself in order to save her lover, whom she tried to kill a glorious number of times was very beautiful and well executed, showing her courage and bravery.
I wish we knew what happend after to Francine and Pierre and to other characters like Corentin (which i despised) and Capitaine Hulot. Balzac actually hated this book, and even critisized it in the preface in the first published copy, but i though it was a very good story which is easy to understand.
>Trigger warning for domestic abuse, it's not perpetrated by a recurrent character and it happens one time.
