La reine étranglée

The second volume of The Accursed Kings, Maurice Druon’s celebrated seven-part historical saga of fourteenth-century France, from the trial of the Templars to the dawn of the Hundred Years’ War. Following The Iron King, the story opens just after the death of Philip the Fair. A weak-willed prince, Louis X the Quarrelsome, whose wife Marguerite of Burgundy is imprisoned for adultery, succeeds an exceptional monarch. As Christendom awaits a pope and the people starve, rivalries, intrigues and plots tear apart the court of France, driving barons, prelates, bankers and the king himself into a deadlock from which only crime can free them.