![]() ![]() When her husband, a homosexual Swiss guardsman, threatens to kill him ("Louise, I do believe I am about to be shot"), Merivel returns to Norfolk, along with a bear he has picked up along the way. There he meets a hazel-eyed beauty called Louise de Flamanville, with whom he resumes his old rakish ways. ![]() So he heads off to Versailles in the hope of being employed by Louis XIV. Merivel himself is "weary and worn down". Charles II is weary, and the nation is weary of him. His daughter has become a beauty, and his loyal retainers are old enough to splash the soup as they serve at table. In Merivel we jump forward 15 years to 1683. He was left at the end of Restoration on his estate in Norfolk having fallen in love with his wife, whom he was forbidden to touch, with a daughter by a madwoman, and with the suspicion that he might be a self-deceiving fool. ![]() He cures one of Charles II's spaniels by leaving it be, makes the king laugh, and is rewarded by being married off to one of the royal mistresses. ![]() He is a sort of medical Samuel Pepys (who himself put in a couple of unnamed appearances in the novel), who tries to live the life of a rake and courtier but can't focus his energies on any one course of life. I n Restoration, published in 1989, Rose Tremain created Sir Robert Merivel, an ebullient Restoration medic. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |