Athalie

Follow a wide set of compelling characters, many of them historical figures, as author Caroline Marie Martin paints for us an absorbing picture of dynastic competition, social change, and love at the height of the Wars of Religion in France and Europe.
Our story opens in 1571 as young Athalie, the orphaned duchesse de La Roque, is uprooted from her peaceful life at Fontevrault Abbey by her aunt, the influential Abbess Louise de Bourbon.

The Abbess distrusts the motives of Athalie's ambitious guardian and uncle, Albert Gondi, comte de Retz, who sent Athalie to Fontevrault following the death of her father, Blaise, duc de La Roque, at the Battle of Moncontour. Gondi silently hopes Athalie will join the convent and thus leave him heir to her extensive properties - and to the title he covets even more than her wealth. He would become duc de La Roque, a royal rank he feels he richly deserves after serving as the Queen Mother Catherine de Medici's most valuable and faithful adviser, her closest confidant.

The Abbess will not accept Athalie's decision to take her vows without experiencing the world outside the protection of the Abbey. She insists that Athalie spend time at Court. Gondi begrudgingly conducts Athalie back to the French Court, where she unhappily endures the endless, shallow festivities in the royal circuit of the various chteaux in France's Loire Valley.
But then Athalie begins to treasure, in secret, the attention of an important gentleman at Court. Confused and unsettled, she vacillates between two worlds. Should she return to Fontevrault to commit herself once more to God? Or should she succumb to her newly awakened passion for a man who can never be hers?

Athalie's inner turmoil mirrors the deadly religious conflict in France that threatens to escalate into civil war. The Italian-born Queen Mother works brilliantly with her astute adviser Gondi, the fellow Italian she endearingly calls caro Gondino, to broker a shaky peace between the Catholic forces loyal to France's throne and the Protestant followers of Admiral Coligny consolidated at La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast.

From the sidelines, Imperial Catholic Spain under Philip II and Protestant England under Elizabeth I, bitter rivals, are waiting to pounce into this French conflict, eyeing an opportunity to acquire territory and siphon off wealth to their own royal treasuries at the expense of the French. The Queen Mother and Gondi, the two Italians, are compelled to use their unsurpassed skills in diplomacy - and subterfuge - to play one power against the other, endeavoring to preserve a semblance of peace and prosperity in their beloved kingdom of France.