The Queen's Embroiderer by Joan Dejean

The Queen's Embroiderer by Joan Dejean

From the author of How Paris Became Paris, a sweeping history of high finance, the origins of high fashion, and a pair of star-crossed lovers in 18th-century France.

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. The Queen's Embroiderer is both a story of star-crossed love in the most beautiful city in the world and a cautionary tale of greed and the dangerous lure of windfall profits. And every bit of it is true.

Since 1988, Joan DeJean has served as a Trustee Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught at Yale and Princeton in the past. She being the author of eleven works on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature, history, and material culture, the most recent of which is How Paris Became Paris: The Creation of the Modern City (2014); The Age of Comfort: When Paris Found Casual--and the Modern Household Started (2009); and The Essence of Style: How the French Created High Fashion, Fine Cuisine, Stylish Cafés, Style, and Sophistry (2009). She lives in Philadelphia and, when in Paris, she stays right around the corner from the house where the story begins in 1612.