The Maid of Honour: A Tale of the Dark Days of France. Vol. 1 (of 3)

France, 1789. The glittering salons of Versailles pulse with masked balls and champagne, while beyond the palace gates, a starving nation tightens its grip on the guillotine. Gabrielle, maid of honour to Marie Antoinette, inhabits a world of breathtaking privilege that she suspects cannot last, and her marriage to the enigmatic Clovis mirrors the kingdom's fracture. His dangerous obsession with mysticism pulls him inward as the world outside descends into chaos. Wingfield writes with a Victorian author's moral clarity and period distance, skewering a nobility so drunk on luxury they cannot hear the mobs at their gates. The storming of the Bastille looms. The scaffold awaits. This is a novel about the blindness of power, the fragility of love, and a civilization dancing toward its own execution. Volume One establishes the personal and political stakes with the slow, inevitable momentum of revolution itself.