Muriel Romana is a screenwriter. We understand his sense of staging and dialogue. In this “Flying Squadron”, these qualities lead the game as well as the characters. Which abound around Catherine de Medici. We can also recognize Périgord accortes there, in particular the most scandalous and fanciful, Isabeau de Limeuil. As a young girl, she languished on the banks of the Dordogne, in her castle of Lanquais where even the carp were circling in the silted moat.
Muriel Romana,
Matthew Zazzo
His cousin the queen
All fortune gone, and the austere beauty of the house exhausted by a recent fire, the boon, for Isabeau, just 16 years old, was to be a distant cousin of the queen and, as such, to be invited to a royal wedding. Gone are the rough stones of Bergeracois, here it is launched at court. Not yet enlisted in the squadron, this flock of young ladies commissioned by the Medici to spy in the beds of the gentlemen that the squealing naughty girls were packing while they unpacked their little affairs and the big ones of the State. A woman, you think, what does she understand about politics and the intrigues of the powerful… Isabeau de Limeuil, and this is the subject of this novel, will demonstrate to the queen, without calculation (a talent which will come to her later ), by her energy and her temerity – how dare she cut off her royal cousin! – that she has the poise and the audacity to steal kisses and confidences under the covers of princes.
Isabeau de Limeuil will demonstrate that she has the poise and the audacity to steal kisses and confidences under the duvets of princes
Archives Anne-Marie Sopkowitz
The Château de Lanquais, the “Louvre” of Périgord, rebuilt in the Italian style by the uncle of Isabeau de Limeuil.
Character Gallery
It is not only a question here of Isabeau, but also of Diane de Poitiers, Louise de la Béraudière, Madeleine de l’Estoile, Claudine de Clermont… We still come across François Clouet, Brantôme, the powerful Guise, Condé (who Isabeau will seduce, for sure, and even like a little, in the second volume), Montaigne, Ambroise Paré, Nostradamus and an astonishing number of nobles of high and less high lineage coming from the confines of Aquitaine, Périgord, Limousin.
From the medieval Venice of Marco Polo (his trilogy has been translated into around fifteen languages) to Samara, the daughter of the desert lost in the golds of Granada (“The Andalusian Sultana”) at the heart of the Renaissance, Muriel Romana spans the ages with incredible ease. The essayist and historian, who now lives in Périgueux, invites us to explore the great and small epics of history in their exceptional aspects.
Now that Isabeau is shaking and rolling up her skirts at court, it remains for Muriel Romana to recount the rest of the adventures of this sparkling Périgourdine, from her tumultuous affair with Condé, who found her too Catholic, to her marriage to the Tuscan banker Sardini. We wait.
“The Flying Squadron” by Muriel Romana, ed. Albin Michel, 352 p., €20.90, ebook, €9.99. Muriel Romana will be at the Lanouaille book fair (24) on June 29.
Read also “Isabeau de Limeuil, the scandalous one” from Périgourdine Isabelle Artiges, ed. of Boreas 2021, 371 p., €19.90, ebook, €9.99.
