THE QUEEN'S EMBROIDERER:

A fascinating and relevant-to-our-own-times historical narrative filled with drama, passion, intrigue and a vividly portrayed cast of real-life characters, all backed by Joan DeJean's unique wealth of original research on French social and cultural history.

DeJean, chaired Professor of French history at the University of Pennsylvania, has earned major accolades for her witty, engaging and brilliantly researched books on how the French gave birth to our concepts of style and fashion (The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Free Press), home design (The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual, and the Modern Home Began, Bloomsbury) and the creation of the modern city (How Paris Became Paris, Bloomsbury). Joan has a devoted Francophile following, but this new project will be a major break-out book for her to reach the additional and huge audience of historical fiction readers.

As the book opens in the 1600s, we meet the progenitors of two striving and gifted Parisian clans that would exert power and influence in the French royal court and governing elite for generations to come - the Magoulets and Chevrots. By 1719, on the eve of a devastating European financial crisis, both families had been seduced by and ensnared in new economic theories that promised unfettered, easy accumulation of wealth by means of taking on unprecedented financial risk, betting on stock market bubbles and attempting to leverage ever increasing debt to accumulate more assets (sound familiar?). When the system collapsed and Europe was simultaneously plagued by a heat wave that destroyed the harvests, France was plunged into chaos. From here Joan follows fabled court embroiderer Jean Magoulet and influential financial advisor Antoine Chevrot and explores how this crisis affected the lives of these families for decades to come, with often terrible results: emotional and physical abuse, attempts to disown, disinherit and deport children they could no longer support, bigamy, identity theft, epic legal battles for recognition that sapped what remained of family resources, perhaps even murder. Emblematic of this dislocation is the tragic "Romeo and Juliet" story of Louise Magoulet and her great love Louis Chevrot. The families hatefully vowed to keep them apart, to the point of condemning the pregnant Louise as a common prostitute, imprisoning her and conspiring to ship her off to the new world as a forgotten criminal.

Greed, financial folly, the pursuit of luxury goods, economic inequality, political exploitation and the odd, unexpected innovations that happen in times of crisis are all part of this epic narrative that encompasses the stories of people who found themselves by chance of fate rotting in a cold cell in the Bastille, or reveling at Versailles or struggling to eke out a decent living in the simple neighborhoods of Paris.

Joan places the reader at the very center of this singular yet strangely familiar time and place and will draw on a trove of newly discovered documents that will ground her narrative in solid historical data. In her expert hands, THE QUEEN'S EMBROIDERER is Joan's most ambitious work to date, at once intimate and sweeping, evocative and pertinent, a book that will appeal to fans of such best-sellers as The Girl with a Pearl Earring, Geraldine Brooks's historical novels and Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes.

Joan DeJean has been Trustee Professor at the University of Pennsylvania since 1988. Before then, she taught at Princeton and Yale. She grew up in Louisiana in a French-speaking family and was educated at Newcomb College/Tulane and then at Yale. Joan has been awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She is the winner of the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French Studies.