Complete and unabridged, with 46 full-page plates by François Clouet, Corneille de Lyon and Valentin de Boulogne. France, 1572: an English boy and a French girl are married as children to settle a lawsuit, and meet again as strangers in Paris in the week of St Bartholomew. Yonge lived her whole life in one Hampshire village and taught Sunday school for seventy-one years; she read the massacre in the sources and wrote it without either side becoming a monster, which is harder than it sounds and rarer than it should be. Forty-six plates of French court portraiture and music-making, from François Clouet to Valentin de Boulogne, restore the Valois world of the novel.
