Eagle and Dove

A DREAM OF PARIS

In a quiet granite house in an old Breton town, three women live as three shadows: an iron-willed spinster aunt who rebuilt the family's fortune from scraps of stamped paper; a faded, colorless cousin; and Anne, who is young, devout, as delicate as a Fra Angelico angel, and stronger than any of them. Across the courtyard, in his dim notary's office, Anne's brother Hervé chafes at his fate. Handsome, brilliant, and born with the profile of an eagle, he despises the provincial trade his aunt's sacrifices bought for him as he dreams of Paris.

When Hervé breaks free at last, Anne follows him, not to share his ascent, but to stop him from destroying himself. What draws the eagle to the heights is exactly what blinds him: ambition, brilliance, the glitter of the capital, and its power to consume even the best men. Against the lures of Paris, Anne has only patience, faith, and a love that asks for nothing in return. And when war comes to France and Paris burns, both brother and sister are tested beyond what anyone in the little house on the Rue du Château could have imagined.

Eagle and Dove is Zénaïde Fleuriot at her most ambitious. It is a novel of provincial Brittany and imperial Paris, of the pull between worldly aspiration and quiet fidelity, carried through the upheavals of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. One of the most widely read French novelists of the nineteenth century, Fleuriot wrote the domestic moral novel with an unusually sharp eye for character and a deep tenderness for the overlooked.

This is the first-ever English translation, by Summer Charrette.