Lorraine: A Romance
The forests of Alsace-Lorraine, 1870. War is a whisper on the wind, but not yet a shout. Jack Marche, a young American wandering Europe, stumbles into something far more dangerous than a scenic tour when he encounters a mysterious man secretly mapping the roads and bridges. That man serves Lorraine de Nesville, a spirited French girl whose father builds balloons and whose family sits on a château perched above a region about to be swallowed by empire. Lorraine is no simpering heroine. She runs a network of watchers, a spider at the center of a web that senses the Prussian advance before any general. When Jack enters her orbit, the chemistry is immediate and dangerous. He's an outsider, American, unburdened by the ancient loyalties that make Lorraine's world go round. But he wants in. He wants her. And as the political clouds darken into war, what begins as a flirtation becomes a question of what one person will sacrifice for another, and for a homeland that may not exist by winter. Chambers writes historical romance with real teeth: the espionage is genuinely tense, the landscape becomes a character, and Lorraine herself is the kind of heroine who decides her own fate.
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“The Luxembourg is within five minutes’ walk of the rue Notre Dame des Champs, and there he sat under the shadow of a winged god, and there he had sat for an hour, poking holes in the dust and watching the steps which lead from the northern terrace to the fountain. The sun hung, a purple globe, above the misty hills of Meudon. Long streamers of clouds touched with rose swept low on the western sky, and the dome of the distant Invalides burned like an opal through the haze. Behind the Palace the smoke from a high chimney mounted straight into the air, purple until it crossed the sun, where it changed to a bar of smouldering fire. High above the darkening foliage of the chestnuts the twin towers of St. Sulpice rose, an ever-deepening silhouette.””
— Robert W. Chambers
“It is easy,” they grumbled, “to crush those insurgents. One regiment of the Line and horses to drag away the cannon would do it; manifestos and placards won’t.” This was true. At that late hour, it would still have been easy to quell the insurrection. The insurgents were fatigued, enervated, confused. Discipline was almost entirely wanting.””
— Robert W. Chambers
