Sainte-Hermine

Les Compagnons de Jehu (The Companions of Jehu) is set in the 1800s, during Napoleon's rise to power. The title refers to a secret organisation of young aristocrats-turned-highwaymen that continuously steals the money of the Directoire in order to finance the restoration of monarchy. It has all the typical Dumas ingredients, that is to say duels, political intrigues, noble heroes and a tragic love store that would make Shakespeare green with envy. Not to mention a hero with a murky past who you will love-to-hate. Be prepared to shed quantities of tears. You've been warned!

The Companions of Jehu were formed in the Lyon region of France in April 1795 to hunt down Jacobins implicated in the Reign of Terror. It is possible that they were founded by The Marquis de Besignan, who also founded royalist underground groups in Forez and Dauphiné with the Prince of Condé in 1796.[5] Their victims are believed to have numbered at least in the hundreds. They were made famous by the 1857 novel The Companions of Jehu by Alexandre Dumas which presented a highly romanticised account of them.

Rousing, big, spirited, its action sweeping across oceans and continents, its hero gloriously indomitable, the last novel of Alexandre Dumas-lost for 125 years in the archives of the National Library in Paris-completes the oeuvre that Dumas imagined at the outset of his literary career. Indeed, the story of France from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, as Dumas vibrantly retold it in his numerous enormously popular novels, has long been absent one vital, richly historical era: the Age of Napoleon. But no longer. Now, dynamically, in a tale of family honor and undying vengeance, of high adventure and heroic derring-do, The Last Cavalier fills that gap.