Les Rois maudits

A deluxe printing on bouffant paper, comprising the complete set of volumes of Druon’s great saga, the last volume of which had just been published: Le Roi de fer, La Reine étranglée, Les Poisons de la Couronne, La Loi des mâles, La Louve de France, Le Lis et le Lion, Quand un roi perd la France.

A precious copy, from the personal library of the author, who had kept a copy of each edition of his masterwork. Nephew of the writer Joseph Kessel, great-grandson of Antoine Cros, third and last King of Araucania (now a region of Chile), and great-great-nephew of the poet Charles Cros, Maurice Druon was steeped from birth in history and literature.

With his novel Les Grandes Familles in 1948, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt, which secured him a place in literary Paris. But it was with the historical and literary saga formed by Les Rois maudits that he achieved lasting fame — a work he never denied was the product of a collaborative workshop: among the collaborators he thanks in his preface are Gilbert Sigaux, Matthieu Galey, Pierre de Lacretelle, José-André Lacour and Edmonde Charles-Roux. The principal contributor was undoubtedly Georges Kessel, brother of Joseph Kessel: a journalist, he had married the actress Janine Crispin in 1938 — who would appear in 1973 in the television adaptation of Les Rois maudits.

Cited by George R. R. Martin, the author of Game of Thrones, as the absolute model of the historical novel, Druon’s saga opens at the beginning of the fourteenth century, during the largest trial history has ever recorded: that of the Templars. Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the Order, dies at the stake, hurling his terrible curse against the King of France, the Pope and the great lords of the kingdom: “Cursed, all cursed to the thirteenth generation of your line!”

From the library of Maurice Druon (bookplate).