The Last Vendée

The Vendée in 1832: the Duchesse de Berry lands to raise the west against Louis-Philippe, and a family is divided between the two sides. Dumas had helped the general who arrested the duchess write his memoir of the rising, and came back to the material a quarter of a century later. The hiding place behind the chimney at Nantes is the historical episode the whole book is built towards. Forty-nine plates by painters including Corot and Millet follow the novel's course from forest edge and pasture to battle, matching the wooded, waterlogged country of the Vendée campaign.