Charles Desmarrins is an 18th century Gatsby. The orphaned son of French peasants, he yearns for the power, prestige, and wealth symbolized by the magnificent and forbidding Chateau de Vau-Gency which rises above the village where he lives. Striving toward that goal, he finds something he didn't even know he wanted. Adele de Vau-Gency is a delicately pretty girl with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, a broken heart, and a pedigree that predates Charlemagne. When she meets Charles Desmarrins, the world-her world-is crumbling. This story of two people from disparate backgrounds is played out...

"I love him." The summer of 1789. France is wracked by violence and upheaveal. The deputies defy the King, the Bastille falls, chateaux are burnt and ravaged. Adele Desmarrins sees her childhood home pillaged, but none of these events matter as much to her as her newly discovered love for her husband, a love she is certain he does not return. "He values me," she says, "it's not the same thing. And I love him. God help me, I love him."

"Manuring their fields," they called it, the improvident, money-hungry nobles of 18th century France, as they held their aristocratic noses and married their sons and daughters to members of a class they despised. A new roof for the chateau, shore up its crumbling walls? Seek out a wealthy bourgeois. The Marquis de Vau-Gency has married his oldest son to the daughter of a tax collector, and when a wealthy financier asks for Adele's hand? No matter that he is a man of whom, in the Marquise's words, 'one has heard everything and consequently knows nothing," the consent is willingly given. And...