The Bath Keepers; Or, Paris in Those Days, V.1(novels of Paul De Kock Volume VII)

Step into 1634 Paris, a city of fogged streets, candlelit taverns, and dangerous games. Léodgard de Marvejols, a handsome young nobleman with more appetite for adventure than fortune, has just lost heavily at the gaming tables and finds himself walking the grimy alleys around Rue Couture-Sainte-Catherine. His encounter with Giovanni, a notorious Italian robber, sets the tone for a novel that refuses to let its characters stay comfortably within their stations. The bathhouses of Paris prove to be the great equalizer, meeting places where servants and aristocrats rub shoulders, where the bath keepers Ambroisine and Bathilde wield their own quiet power over the hearts of men. Through street brawls and moonlight balcony meetings, through dice games won and lost, through a cast of rogues, marquises, Bohemians, and mysterious strangers with five faces, Paul de Kock paints a Paris that thrums with life, lust, and the eternal dance of desire and deception. Volume One traces the webs of connection beginning to bind these fates together, leading toward the shadows of the Cardinal de Richelieu himself. For readers who crave the raw, colorful texture of old Paris before it became a museum, this is historical fiction with its sleeves rolled up and its fists ready.