I greatly enjoyed Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye and was excited to pick this one up as well given how effectively he wrote his other historical mystery. And though I liked it a hair less, it did not disappoint.
There has always been a curiosity amongst conspiracy theorists wondering what if some historical figures survived death. Hitler in the bunker. The princes in the Tower. And Louis-Charles, the dauphin of France and rightful heir to the throne of his father, Louis XVI. Sadly for him, he had the misfortune to exist during the French Revolution and was deemed guilty-by-association, tortured to death in Paris’ version of London Tower. A DNA test in 1999 would confirm that the body was indeed the dauphin’s.
(Robe Lowe in The Grinder voice) But what if it wasn’t?
That particular what if makes for a fun historical mystery romp through Paris and St. Cloud as a disgraced doctor and famous detective attempt to follow a thread of clues that lead to the possibility of a living Louis XVII. Just because we know this didn’t happen doesn’t dull the joy of reading this. Textured in the way Bayard writes, the book doubles as a commentary of the fraught political situation in France at the time, as it had begun the wobbly transition back to monarchical rule following Bonapartism following Robespierre following the ancien regime. All of this happened in a stretch of thirty years and would lead to more wild times. A man with a legitimate claim to the throne — one directly from his beheaded father, a symbol of what had been won and lost depending on how you look at it — would make things worse. Bayard does a great job of capturing this.
I docked it a star behind Bayard’s other book because it gets needlessly twisty at the end and I don’t think it needs to. The book is fine on its merits minus the last twenty or so pages. But it’s still very good and a lot of fun. I hope Bayard churns out more of these.