France, August 1572: three brothers of a Huguenot house ride for Paris, and the bells of St Germain l'Auxerrois are about to ring. Weyman failed at the bar and was briefly jailed in France as a suspected spy while on holiday; this was his first novel, and the massacre in it is the real thing — the streets, the white armbands, the doors marked in chalk. Fifty-eight plates of French court portraiture and allegory, including work by François Clouet and Antoine Caron, give a sixteenth-century face to the novel's world of noble conspiracy and massacre.
