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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Lost King,' Rafael Sabatini weaves a captivating tale of adventure and intrigue set against the backdrop of the tumultuous 17th century. Written with Sabatini's signature flair for vivid characterization and rich historical detail, the novel follows the story of a deposed monarch in disguise as he navigates the treacherous political landscape of his disenchanted kingdom. The narrative seamlessly blends romance, action, and moral quandaries, highlighting both the valor and vulnerabilities of its protagonist while exploring themes of identity, loyalty, and the struggle for power in a meticulously crafted historical setting. Rafael Sabatini, an Italian-English novelist, was deeply influenced by his own eclectic heritage and extensive travels throughout Europe. His unique background fostered a passion for history and a profound understanding of the complexities of human nature and political ambition. This knowledge is palpable in 'The Lost King,' where his narrative skillfully reflects the tensions of loyalty and betrayal amid a vivid historical tapestry'—drawing from his fascination with royal legacies and the fraught dynamics of power. For readers in search of an enthralling blend of history and narrative artistry, 'The Lost King' is a must-read. Sabatini's masterful storytelling not only provides an exhilarating adventure but also invites contemplation on the nature of leadership and personal sacrifice. Immerse yourself in this compelling narrative that transcends its time period and resonates with the perennial quest for belonging and redemption. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Lost King
Table of Contents
Introduction
In a world remade by revolution, the specter of a vanished prince challenges every certainty about identity, loyalty, and the right to rule. Rafael Sabatini’s The Lost King opens on the unsettled ground where street rumor and statecraft meet, inviting readers into a climate of suspicion, hope, and calculated daring. The novel’s tension arises less from battlefield clashes than from whispered claims and perilous choices, where one disputed life could tilt the balance of an age. Without disclosing later turns, the book begins by treating a persistent mystery as both a human drama and a political fault line.
A historical novel by Rafael Sabatini, The Lost King belongs to the tradition of adventure fiction rooted in carefully rendered period settings. Published in the 1930s, it reflects the author’s mature phase, when he explored European upheavals with a blend of narrative velocity and historical attentiveness. The story unfolds chiefly in France during and after the Revolution, when the old order’s collapse and the new order’s consolidation left space for legends to grow. Sabatini’s interest is not antiquarian; he uses the era’s shifting allegiances to examine how power is won, justified, or contested when the meaning of legitimacy itself is in dispute.
The premise centers on the long shadow cast by the French royal family’s tragedy, particularly the enduring question of whether the child heir—remembered as the Dauphin—might have survived imprisonment. Sabatini frames this uncertainty as a fuse that ignites schemes, loyalties, and betrayals among men and women navigating surveillance, secret networks, and volatile public sentiment. A capable, principled protagonist is drawn into this vortex, forced to move between salons and back alleys, dossiers and swordplay. The resulting experience is one of swift-paced intrigue grounded in plausible historical pressures, offering suspense without relying on supernatural devices or implausible coincidence.
Readers will find Sabatini’s familiar hallmarks: economical, polished prose; a tactful balance between action and deliberation; and an ear for the rhythms of political conversation. The mood is taut but not grim, suffused with the clarity of a writer who trusts momentum and character over ornament. Dramatic set pieces emerge from moral and strategic dilemmas rather than spectacle for its own sake. Period detail supplies texture—fashions in address, the menace of official paperwork, the choreography of duels—without submerging the narrative. The result is an adventure that moves decisively from uncertainty to confrontation, always anchored in credible human motivations.
Beneath its suspense, the novel probes questions that reach beyond one epoch. What constitutes a rightful claim to rule: birth, consent, or the story people accept? How do memory and myth travel through families, parties, and police files, altering lives even when documents are scarce? Sabatini threads these inquiries through personal choices: the price of honor under surveillance, the ethics of imposture, and the fragile boundary between loyalty to a person and loyalty to an idea. The Lost King thus examines the machinery of belief as keenly as the machinery of government, revealing how narratives confer identity—and how they can endanger it.
Contemporary readers may recognize in this historical canvas the modern dynamics of contested truth, charismatic rumor, and the politicization of memory. The novel’s world, like ours, grapples with the speed at which unverified claims can assemble factions, harden emotions, and reshape institutions. Sabatini does not preach; he dramatizes how fear, hope, and calculation feed on uncertainty, and how ordinary people must navigate that fog. The book’s appeal lies in its dual promise: the pleasures of a deftly staged adventure and the intellectual provocation of watching legitimacy argued not only in courts and councils but also in streets, salons, and clandestine cells.
Approached as either an escapade or a study in historical psychology, The Lost King rewards attention to motive, consequence, and the delicate politics of identity. It offers readers a tightly plotted journey through perilous decisions where every allegiance carries risk, and where courage is measured as much in restraint as in audacity. Without spoiling later revelations, it is fair to say that the novel sustains its interest by testing convictions against changing evidence and shifting tides. For those who value clear prose, nimble pacing, and morally textured stakes, Sabatini’s tale provides both excitement and a lens on how stories shape the fates of nations.
Synopsis
Rafael Sabatini’s The Lost King opens amid the convulsions of the French Revolution, when the monarchy collapses and the young Dauphin, Louis XVII, disappears into the shadowed confines of the Temple prison. Rumor and uncertainty take root as the nation remakes itself under shifting regimes. Against this unsettled backdrop, whispers persist that the child might have survived, escaping death and captivity. Sabatini frames the intrigue as both a political question and a human mystery, setting the stage for a tale of pursuit, secrecy, and contested identity in which the fate of one boy appears to hold the symbolic future of France.
Years later, in a France still divided by memories of Terror, Empire, and Restoration, a young gentleman of modest fortune becomes entangled in the enduring riddle of the lost king. Drawn by duty to older Royalist patrons and by personal curiosity, he accepts a discreet commission: to follow a thin thread of evidence suggesting the Dauphin lived beyond the Temple. The task begins with fragile clues—coded letters, a ring with a private device, guarded testimonies from those who once served the royal household. What starts as a cautious inquiry soon becomes a dangerous passage through salons, safe houses, and police files.
His initial steps lead him from provincial roads to the capital, where factions watch one another with habitual suspicion. A chance encounter with a frightened witness and a narrow escape from surveillance reveal that others pursue the same secret—some to crown a claimant, others to expose imposture. The investigator learns to balance tact and decisiveness, working with a veteran émigré and a practical-minded woman who knew the royal children before the fall. Each piece of testimony suggests survival without proving it, and each document invites counterfeit. He begins to understand that truth, if found, will carry consequences beyond private satisfaction.
In Paris, the inquiry acquires sharper edges. He consults a physician rumored to have tended the child in captivity, a nervous gaoler who remembers a transfer on a stormy night, and an official clerk whose records do not quite match the accepted account. The police, wary of anything that might disturb public order, shadow his movements, while salon talk mixes nostalgia with calculation. A ministerial figure, urbane and implacable, warns him off under the guise of friendly advice. Nonetheless, the dossier grows: initials on a scrap of linen, a lullaby recalled by a stranger, and a signet said to be unmistakable.
A turning point arrives with betrayal. An associate sells information, and the protagonist is briefly detained, confronting the machinery of state that suppresses destabilizing legends. Released through intervention he does not fully trust, he presses on, retrieving a long-hidden memorandum from a ruined house connected to the Temple warders. The text raises as many doubts as it resolves. He must choose between delivering a convenient narrative to powerful sponsors or continuing a search that could embarrass allies and empower opportunists. The question shifts from whether a boy survived to whether any living man could responsibly bear the burden of that identity.
The trail carries him beyond Paris to places where Royalist memory burns brightest—remote châteaux, coastal towns, and émigré circles abroad. There he encounters a quiet man guarded by loyalists who hint at a hidden lineage. The scene is neither coronation nor unmasking but an austere interview measured by private tokens: childhood habits, phrases taught in the palace nursery, scars spoken of in old letters. A rival faction advances a different candidate, promising swift vindication if the cautious inquiry would only yield. Our investigator resists haste, sensing the difference between proof and performance, and feeling how hope can be weaponized.
As rumors crest, adversaries converge: police determined to prevent a pretender’s ascent, partisans eager to parade a savior, and cynics ready to profit from confusion. A public gathering threatens to force a definitive revelation. Calculated provocations turn the air volatile, and a misstep could spark street violence. The protagonist acts to restrain the moment, choosing a course meant to protect lives rather than satisfy curiosity. What emerges is a partial illumination—enough to guide the prudent but not to silence believers. He recognizes that certainty may be less attainable than integrity, and that restraint can be the only serviceable courage.
After the crisis, consequences unfold quietly. Some reputations are salvaged, others diminished, and officialdom files the matter among disturbances that never fully die. The man he followed recedes into obscurity or safety, and the investigator’s own future narrows to a modest path consistent with his conscience. Relationships formed in peril resolve with mutual respect rather than romantic flourish, and debts of gratitude are settled without fanfare. The Restoration’s precarious balance survives another strain, yet the idea of the lost king endures, adaptable to new circumstances and claimants. The narrative closes by acknowledging both the solace and the peril of legend.
Throughout, Sabatini presents the mystery as a test of memory, legitimacy, and the uses of belief. The novel’s pace blends inquiry with pursuit, moving from archives and antechambers to roads and crowded rooms, while declining to pronounce an absolute verdict. Instead, it emphasizes the human costs of political longing and the moral complexity of reviving a past that can neither be restored nor safely forgotten. The lost king becomes less a person than a measure of what France, and individuals within it, choose to remember. The result is an adventure grounded in ambiguity, duty, and the restraint of hard-won wisdom.
Historical Context
Rafael Sabatini’s The Lost King is set chiefly in France from the crisis years of the French Revolution through the Bourbon Restoration and into the early decades of the nineteenth century. Its geographical canvas moves between Paris—the political heart where the Tuileries, the Temple prison, and revolutionary committees operated—and provincial strongholds of royalist resistance such as the Vende9e and Brittany. The narrative’s time frame spans roughly 1792 to the 1830s, encompassing the fall of the monarchy, the Terror, the Directory, the Napoleonic regime, and the contentious Restoration. This setting allows the novel to dramatize the unstable question of legitimacy after 1792 and to explore how competing regimes leveraged rumor, policing, and propaganda to control France.
The fall of the French monarchy, triggered by the insurrection of 10 August 1792, the storming of the Tuileries, and the suspension of Louis XVI, created the context for the prince’s captivity. On 21 September 1792 the National Convention abolished the monarchy; Louis XVI was executed on 21 January 1793. The royal family was confined to the Temple in Paris from August 1792, with the Dauphin Louis-Charles—styled by royalists as Louis XVII—separated from Marie Antoinette on 3 July 1793 and placed under the cobbler-jailer Antoine Simon. The novel’s core tension derives from this imprisonment, using Paris and the Temple as crucibles in which to examine the birth of the “lost king” legend and the hopes attached to his survival.
The reported death of the Dauphin in the Temple on 8 June 1795, at age ten, became a historical enigma. Dr. Philippe-Jean Pelletan performed an autopsy and secretly preserved the child’s heart, later a relic for legitimists and, much later, tested by DNA in 2000 and matched to Marie Antoinette’s maternal line. In the 1790s the Convention’s secrecy, the presence of multiple child prisoners, and the turmoil of the Terror seeded substitution theories. The novel engages directly with this uncertainty: it treats the contradictions in official accounts, the disappearance of records, and the ease with which a hidden child or impostor could be instrumentalized as a rallying symbol for royalist conspirators.
Nineteenth-century pretenders amplified the Louis XVII controversy. Karl Wilhelm Naundorff arrived in Paris in 1833, claimed royal recognition, won support among ex-court insiders, was expelled in 1836, and died at Delft in 1845. Others included Jean-Marie Hervagault (active 1798e31804), the so-called Baron de Richemont (Henri He9bert, tried 1833), Mathurin Bruneau (tried 1818), and Eleazer Williams in the United States. Their claims intersected with post-1830 Legitimist politics under the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe. Sabatini’s narrative mirrors these episodes by depicting how factions vet, fund, and deploy claimants, and by charting the forensic, testimonial, and political maneuvers through which identity and sovereignty were contested in public and secret arenas.
The Vende9e uprising (1793e396) and the Chouannerie in Brittany and Normandy (1794e300) were royalist Catholic insurrections against the revolutionary state’s leve9e en masse, dechristianization, and centralization. Leaders included Jacques Cathelineau, Frane7ois de Charette, and Jean-Nicolas Stofflet; key episodes were Torfou (19 September 1793) and the crushing defeat at Savenay (23 December 1793). The Republic’s brutal reprisals—Jean-Baptiste Carrier’s “noyades” at Nantes and the infernal columns—scarred the West. Quiberon (Junee3July 1795) saw a failed British-backed royalist landing. The novel channels these wars’ networks and hopes, showing how the idea of a living Dauphin energized recruiting, smuggling, and intelligence in the Atlantic provinces and provided leverage for émigre9 leaders and clandestine agents.
The Reign of Terror (September 1793e3July 1794) institutionalized surveillance via the Committee of Public Safety, the Law of Suspects (17 September 1793), and the Revolutionary Tribunal. Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon centralized repression until 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794) toppled Robespierre. Parisian prisons, informers, and household searches created a documentary fog in which a child’s fate could be obscured. The novel reflects this infrastructure of fear and paperwork, invoking warders, municipal sections, and shifting custodians. By foregrounding bureaucratic opacity and the fluidity of custody inside the Temple and the capital’s carceral web, it underscores how revolutionary governance inadvertently nourished the plausibility of substitution and escape narratives.
Under Napoleon, policing was professionalized: Joseph Fouche9 served as Minister of Police (1799e3810, briefly 1815), with the Duke of Rovigo (Savary) continuing surveillance. After 1814, the Bourbon Restoration under Louis XVIII and Charles X saw alternating conciliation and reaction, including the White Terror of 1815 and press controls. The July Revolution of 1830 replaced Charles X with Louis-Philippe, intensifying the Legitimiste2Orleanist rift and reviving interest in a hypothetical Louis XVII. The novel situates intrigues across these regimes, showing how police files, court patronage, and exile politics shaped the rise of claimants and how each government sought to appropriate or suppress the Dauphin myth to stabilize its own legitimacy.
As a social and political critique, the book exposes how regimes exploit symbols and vulnerable bodies—above all a child—to manufacture consent, discredit enemies, and mask administrative violence. It interrogates class divides visible in Parisian prisons, revolutionary committees, and émigre9 salons, where access to records, witnesses, and legal remedies tracked wealth and status. By tracing the recycling of the Dauphin legend from the Terror through the Restoration and July Monarchy, the novel condemns opportunism, censorship, and secret-police methods. It ultimately questions claims to legitimacy grounded in myth rather than accountable governance, highlighting how rumor, factional propaganda, and state surveillance colluded to perpetuate injustice.
