Excerpt from Farewell, My Queen by Chantal Thomas, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I would like to give an account of that defeat; it happened so quickly, it was so total and complete, but in some sense it has remained a secret, a tale never told. A stealthy defeat, one might almost say . . . A moment of silent consternation, a few words so exchanged as not to be overheard, orders given, great lords disguising themselves as servants, and carriages moving at a gallop along the roads. There was no moonlight on that night of July sixteenth 1789, and when I turned around to look back at Versailles, the château, hidden by forest darker even than the sky, had disappeared . . . I would like to tell the story of that desertion, thus appeasing the intruders who invade my dreams and mitigating the isolation of days spent in this enclosed space composed of silence, wakefulness and writing: my room, which I now rarely leave and which, when the fancy takes me, I call "my castle of solitude." I shall find a place for everything that comes back to me, all the remembered fragments of a wrecked world; I shall not be so heartless as to kill that world a second time by stroking things out. My mind takes up the same facts again and again, changing them to fit my changing daydreams, while other, possibly more essential facts have been obliterated. I do have this excuse: I speak of a time long ago, a time leading nowhere, certainly not to our grim nineteenth century, even if some people, naive in their use of numbers and fooled by hindsight, see in that earlier century no more than the prelude to this one.

From Farewell My Queen by Chantal Thomas. Copyright Chantal Thomas 2003. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.