Stray Pearls

The Fronde from inside: a young French noblewoman, widowed and with an English mother, watches Paris rise against Mazarin — the barricades, the great ladies playing at war, Condé, the Queen and the boy king who will not forget it. Yonge lived her whole life in one Hampshire village and wrote from the memoirs; the Fronde in this book is a rebellion run as a society entertainment, which is what it was. Fifty-seven plates, from Munch to Champaigne, trace the same story the book tells: mothers and daughters at home while armies and kings, Louis XIV among them, move across the France of the Fronde.