ASYLUM FOR THE QUEEN

A romantic and dramatic story of a little known facet of Pennsylvania's history, the story of a tiny community, known as Asylum, established as a refuge for Marie Antoinette by a group of exiles from a France torn by Revolution. The story centers around Pierre Michelait, a youthful member of the court at Versailles, worshipping the Queen (while taking his amours as an accepted part of a life in that period of decadence). A picture of Paris with its veneer of glamour, its morasses of crime and vice and venality, its degradation underneath; a flash of the new ideas that were gripping the upper classes, here and there, that were sweeping the underprivileged to the brink of violence and Revolution. Pierre met and loved the little dancer- but married Victoire -- and always put his Queen first in loyalty, even when it cost him imprisonment, loss of everything material, threat of death. Then, with a carefully planned escape, he was charged with a mission to prepare her way in the new ""asylum"" overseas. When word came to the struggling little community of her death and Louis', hopes were focussed on the little Dauphin, and finally a child arrived in Philadelphia, the claim made that here was the lost Dauphin. Into the story had come new romance -- with a mysterious young woman who had a treacherous part to play in the disappearance again of the little Dauphin. And at the close, Pierre comes back to Paris, which reclaims him as her own. The story holds one through the very meticulousness of the details -- though I found my interest flagged in a not wholly realized denouement. The author, whose One Red Rose Forever won many admirers, shows greater maturity and sureness in this more ambitious work.