'The Queen's Embroiderer' Stitches Up A Twisted Family Saga
Joan DeJean's latest dive into French history starts with something simple — the appointment of a royal embroiderer. But then things get weird: inheritance fraud, elopements, double lives and more.
Sometimes it can be such a comfort to forget current events for a little while and lose oneself in a nice cozy slice of history, a moment when a family of greedy, abusive, litigious frauds scrabbled for power using obsequious ingratiation, shameless lies, mounting debt, and outright cruelty — against a national backdrop of rapid economic shifts built on precarious foundations and exploited by corrupt government officials, so the rich got richer and everyone else was
