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 Château 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 against the backdrop of that world-of France with its rigidly separate classes, of the salons, streets, and theatres of Paris, of the Palais-Royal (that forerunner of contemporary shopping malls), and the court at Versailles. No one personifies that glittering world more clearly than the Austrian princess who sat on the throne of France, without whom Thomas Jefferson said there would have been no revolution. Marie Antoinette was frivolous, fascinating and exasperating, a loyal friend, a dangerous enemy. Across the years she dazzles.