Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Dore by George Sand (1858)

What a glorious feast. The difference of this one is its setting in time. All of the Sands I've read to date have been contemporaneous to her biography. This one is set right back in 1622, presenting a Sandian version of the times of The Three Musketeers, and concentrating in the main on the rebellion of the Huguenots. Sylvain de Bois-Dore, the elder of the two messieurs, is a scented and primped creature trying to retain his youth, but not at all effeminate. He is infatuated with the French classic pastoral romance Astree, and builds a fantasy of chivalry around it which completely permeates his life. His brother has been murdered in Spain in a mysterious way that he feels he can't get at or solve. The irruption into his chateau of a guest, d'Alvimar, presented by Sand almost as a kind of evil echo of Quixote, who has an offsider coincidentally named Sancho, precipitates a revelation and some tension. The revelation is that they may have been involved in his brother's murder, and the tension arises from the fact that they are fervent Catholics, whereas Bois-Dore is an ambivalent Huguenot who has taken on Catholicism to make things easy for himself. Suspicions arise everywhere. At the same time a group of Spanish gypsies visit the area. Bois-Dore is struck by the beauty and familiarity of one of the young ones, whose name is Mario. It is eventually revealed that he is the son of Bois-Dore's lost brother, and that the gypsies have the clue which reveals the culpability of d'Alvimar and Sancho in his loss. So, in the midst of political intrigue and secrets all around, this personal intrigue also comes to its climax, which is murderous and revengeful. Meanwhile, love blossoms between Mario, the now adopted younger messieur, and another guest of the chateau, Lauriane de Beuvres, who is an extremely young widow with fervent Huguenot credentials. Sand revels in all these strings of story, loving tangling them and then unravelling. Minor characters abound, lending humour, savagery, superstition, aristocracy and political angles. The landscape also plays an effectual part, with the Berry valleys, rivers, inns and chateaux bright in the piece. Not one, as I've said before, for lovers of tight singular plotting, but for lovers of a broad tapestry stitched in a thousand colours, perfect.