It is HOLY WEEK, the seven days between Palm Sunday and Easter. The year is 1815. Napoleon has landed from Elba and is marching toward Paris, "the Eagle flying from steeple to steeple," his army increasing every hour. Louis XVIII has assured his dear people of Paris that he will never abandon them. On the gray and rainy afternoon of Palm Sunday a monstrous coach sweeps out of the courtyard of the Tuileries and heads north. Surrounded by his troops of Musketeers, it carries the fleeing King. Behind follows a train of jostling coaches and carriages, wagons and berlins, wives and mistresses, newly returned nobles and Marshals remembering their days of glory. The Royal Household is following its master. With the skill of Dickens in minutely exploring and intimately revealing the joys, griefs, sufferings and tragedies of the interwoven lives of his characters, with the grand sweep of Tolstoy and the grasp of an epoch and the multiplicity of dramas of Victor Hugo, but with his own conception and style, Aragon brilliantly paints the panorama of that flight north. Although most of the principal characters are historical personages, Aragon declares this is not an historical novel. With the inalienable rights of the imagination of a novelist he has re-created his people, their lives, careers and emotions, and shown their epoch as the passing of a phase of French history.
Author
Louis Aragon was a major figure in the avant-garde movements that shaped French literary and visual culture in the 20th century. His long career as a poet, novelist, communist polemicist and bona-fide war hero, secured him his place in the pantheon of French literary greats. With André Breton and Phillipe Soupault, Aragon launched the Surrealist movement and through his 1926 novel, Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant), produced what is considered by most to be the movement's defining literary text. Having parted company with the movement in the early 1930s, Aragon devoted his energies to the French Communist Party and went on to produce a vast body of literature that combined elements of the avant-garde and social realism. Giving his voice and images to the art of France, Aragon was a leading influence on the shaping of the novel in the early to mid-twentieth century. He was also and an editor and a critic, being a member of the Académie Goncourt. After 1959, he was a frequent nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
