Kings in Exile by Alphonse Daudet (1879)

This is a lesser-known novel by the author. It concerns the deposed royal family of Illyria, which roughly coincides with Dalmatia, which roughly coincides with coastal Croatia today. As is usual in their time, one of the decline and obliteration of minor royalty all over Europe, when revolution comes, the King and Queen and young weakling Prince Zara head for Paris, along with a sizeable part of the court for support. Christian, the monarch, is a devotee of pleasure and has never been particularly comfortable with the more strictured part of his royal role, whereas Frederique, his wife, is as strong as an ox, staunch in her desire to regain power, to uphold what she believes to be their destiny to rule. This awkward contrast between their personalities dictates their future. Christian, relieved of the bother of rule, descends quickly into gaming and debt, wine and women. Frederique is at first ignorant of quite how far he's dropped into the mire of Paris. Soon he is selling any aristocratic titles in his gift to all and sundry, simply in order to gain money for his dubious exploits. All of Frederique's grand plans for reinstatement finally go awry when a foolhardy counter-revolution is planned, reluctantly agreed to by Christian. He gets waylaid while journeying to their port of embarkation by a furious mistress who has secretly planned to get him to abdicate by shrouding him in debt from which he can't escape without terrible exposure. This way she and her cronies hope to benefit from his personal wealth which is currently tied up with the crown and maintaining the royal presence and hope. What she doesn't know is that all this rumoured personal wealth is gone. Waylaid by her, he ditheringly fails to join his troop of counter-revolutionaries in an already highly unlikely effort. Vital messages are not communicated at a critical time; the sortie fails miserably, and almost all of the men are killed. Daudet surrounds these central characters and their melancholic struggling lowering fate with a group of self-serving ingrates on the one hand, and a few loyal fervent believers on the other. There is an unusual contrast at work here, between a kind of tragic fated destiny and a species of grimly realised enervation, almost like the author couldn't quite decide to which camp he belonged. Were these people deserving of their fate? For all the uncomfortability of that, this remains a fascinating bitter-melancholic exposure of the regal and the rotten.