The Queen's Embroiderer
A True Story of Paris, Lovers, Swindlers, and the First Stock Market Crisis
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ISBN10: 1632864746
ISBN13: 9781632864741
Hardcover
400 Pages
$30.00
CA$40.00
Paris, 1719. The stock market is surging and the world's first millionaires are buying everything in sight. Against this backdrop, two families, the Magoulets and the Chevrots, rose to prominence only to plummet in the first stock market crash. One family built its name on the burgeoning financial industry, the other as master embroiderers for Queen Marie-Thérèse and her husband, King Louis XIV. Both patriarchs were ruthless money-mongers, determined to strike it rich by arranging marriages for their children.
But in a Shakespearean twist, two of their children fell in love. To remain together, Louise Magoulet and Louis Chevrot fought their fathers' rage and abuse. A real-life heroine, Louise took on Magoulet, Chevrot, the police, an army regiment, and the French Indies Company to stay with the man she loved.
Following these families from 1600 until the Revolution of 1789, Joan DeJean recreates the larger-than-life personalities of Versailles, where displaying wealth was a power game; the sordid cells of the Bastille; the Louisiana territory, where Frenchwomen were forcibly sent to marry colonists; and the legendary "Wall Street of Paris," Rue Quincampoix, a world of high finance uncannily similar to what we know now.
Reviews
Praise for The Queen's Embroiderer
"[The Queen’s Embroiderer] features guild-hopping, inheritance fraud, domestic abuse, eloping to England, sending toddlers to their deaths, locking the gates against the poor, and the occasional escape from a chain gang. There's an impressive depth of research—this is, as much as anything else, a mystery about the manipulation of record-keeping and identity . . . Some aspects of the wider upheaval are striking, as DeJean builds a credible picture of the mania of a nation becoming an empire: Monarchy as economy, war as opportunity, slavery as profit margin. . . . That there are so few loose ends in this two-century saga is a testament to DeJean's research."—NPR.org
"In this twisted tale of two French families, DeJean interweaves the rise and fall of the Magoulets and the Chevrots, who took divergent paths to wealth, power, and ignominy."—Booklist Online