Provence, 1799: a company of royalist highwaymen rob the government's gold with perfect courtesy and give it to the Vendée, while Bonaparte comes back from Egypt to take the country. Dumas wrote the coup and the coach-robberies as one story — Bonaparte himself is in the room where it is decided — and the book has the fastest opening in his work. Fifty-seven plates of roads and highwaymen by painters from Taunay to Munch, from the stagecoach's arrival to brigands cleared from the earth, follow the novel's coach-robberies in paint.
