The Porcelain Dove

Eighteenth-century France is the setting—a time and place where age-old superstitions shadow an age of enlightenment, where the minuet of aristocratic life is deaf to the approaching drumbeats of revolution, where elegance masks depravity and licentiousness makes a mockery of love. Against this background, Berthe Duvet, maid to Adele du Fourchet, later mme la duchesse de Malvoeux, tells her tale of a doomed society and of a family seeking to break a terrible curse. Vivid in its re-creation of a vanished age and delightfully iconoclastic in its view of women and history, The Porcelain Dove is a triumph of the imagination.