Angelique

Angelique (original Angelique) is a series of 13 French historical adventure books by the novelist duo Anne and Serge Golon. The first 10 books have been adapted into English while numbers 11-13 have not. Some of these books were then adapted into 5 popular movies. The eponymous protagonist is a 17th-century woman born into the provincial aristocracy in the west of France. In successive books she marries at a young age the romantic and talented Count of Toulouse; gets her domestic bliss destroyed when King Louis XIV has her husband executed on trumped up charges; descends into the underworld of Paris; emerges and through a turbulent second marriage gets admittance to the court at Versailles; loses her second husband in war, just as she had started to truly love him, and subsequently refuses to become the King's mistress; finds that her first husband is after all alive but is hiding somewhere in the Mediterranean; sets out on a highly risky search, gets captured by pirates, sold into slavery in Crete, taken into the harem of the King of Morocco, stabs the King when he tries to have sex with her, and stages a daring escape along with a French slave who becomes her lover; gets back to France, only to be put under house arrest in her ancestral home and raped by rampaging royal soldiers, which arouses the province to a rebellion which is brutally put down; finds refuge with a Huguenot family and - just as they are threatened by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes - is saved in the nick of time by her long-lost first husband appearing at La Rochelle and taking them all to America in his ship; and being reunited also with her children, which she thought dead but were alive and well in America. Then follows many more adventures in colonial North America - specifically, in French Acadia - involving French and English settlers, Indians and pirates.


Genre: Historical