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Olympe de Clèves - The King's Actress - Book 1: A New Translation
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Nov 14 2025
Pages: 366
Weight: 0.97
Height: 0.91 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
When passion collides with royal intrigue, two lives ignite-and burn.
Avignon, 1727. Bannière, a young Jesuit novice consumed by theatrical passion, glimpses the dazzling actress Olympe de Clèves through his convent window and is struck by a thunderbolt of desire. In a heartbeat, he abandons his religious vows and flees to the theater, where a twist of fate lands him onstage-and into Olympe's tumultuous world.
Olympe is magnificent, tempestuous, and fiercely independent-a woman who lives by her own rules in a society that demands her submission. Just abandoned by her aristocratic lover, the Comte de Mailly, she finds herself drawn to the passionate, impulsive Bannière. Together they flee toward Lyon, chased by scandal, torn by jealousy, and hunted by ambitious courtiers with sinister designs.
At the glittering court of young King Louis XV, the Duc de Richelieu orchestrates an elaborate conspiracy to corrupt the twenty-year-old monarch by providing him with a mistress. Their chosen target? The incomparable Olympe de Clèves. As political machinations tighten around them, Bannière's love descends into obsessive jealousy, driving him to the edge of madness-literally locked away in the Charenton asylum, declared mad with love.
A sweeping tale of theatrical brilliance, forbidden passion, and devastating sacrifice-where love and theater blur until life itself becomes the greatest performance of all.
Written by Alexandre Dumas in collaboration with Auguste Maquet, Olympe de Clèves features one of literature's most complex and accomplished female characters: a woman who refuses to be owned, even by the king himself.
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