Camille Pascal won the Grand Prix du roman of the Académie française

In spite of the vow of Louis XIII, the Holy Virgin, in these last days of July, 1830, no longer a good mother to France ? The castle of Saint-Cloud, where the Court resides in the summer, the prince Jules de Polignac, the chief minister of Charles X, does not believe it, as much as, it seems, she honors her visits special. Is this she who was blown to sign on to the king, between the mass and the hunting of which he is also fond of, the four orders being coup de force against the freedom of the press and the parliamentary system ? Soon, Paris growls and ignites. At least the devotees of Mary, who thronged around the royal family had they been well advised to ponder the words of the Magnificat : "Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles. "But these awards are always for others, even recently, for the detestable Bonaparte, and when, on the 29th of July, the apophtegme is true, it is too late. On the third day of the parisian insurrection sealing the Three Glorious days, the elder branch of the family of Bourbon had ceased to reign over France, as Talleyrand with relish. Place to the younger, represented by Louis-Philippe of Orléans, who, in the folds of the tricolor flag, raid the setting of royal hands weaklings of the other three, the father, Charles X, the son of the duke of Angouleme, blessed by the name of Louis XIX, the time to sign his abdication, and the grandson the duke of Bordeaux proclaimed Kingbetting Henri V, carried away into an exile from which he was never to return.

Sixty years after the unforgettable holy Week of Aragon, who described the flight of Louis XVIII to the Hundred Days through the eyes of Géricault – but this king-there had been able to return –, Mr. Camille Pascal, not unequal to its predecessor, is a columnist meticulous and check light-hearted of the fall and the funeral procession of the monarchy of the white flag fleurdelysé. From 25 July to 16 August, it is everywhere where his ardour, the door, meeting everyone in the lounges, to the Room, the Town hall, on the barricades, and up to Cherbourg, where, at the end of a long retreat, all the princes of the fallen boarded the american vessels leading in England, while the lieutenant-general and new king of the French climbs at his own pace the steps of the throne, carried by Thiers, Lafayette, diplomats and bankers. The author, obviously, is fun ; reading, writing. The sages of the Dome also : The Summer of the four kings has just won the Grand Prix du roman of the French Academy at the expense of Alain Mabanckou, Gilles-Martin Chauffier and Thomas B. Reverdy.

The reading of the many and wonderful Memories of the contemporaries, those, cookie-cutter, Adèle de Boigne, or, detached and supremely lucid, Charles de Rémusat, provides a jubilation intense at the same time as a substance of things seen skillfully exploited. And Camille Pascal draws from it, by innutrition, a delight of writing-communicative and quasi-stendhalien, excelling in the brush stroke – "His Majesty did not like to think about it, but liked to pray," the duchess of Orleans, "Marie-Amélie, whose tears only blurred my not-quite-ambitions" – or in the rendering of the body sweating, anxiety, or fever in the burning of a been overwhelming. And the success of this big piece of bravery is that the author, detached from his personal itinerary, and be neither a graduate nor mandarin, concludes nothing, neither for yesterday nor for today ; if not that the story is a novel.

"The Summer of the four kings", by Camille Pascal. Plon, 662 p. 22,90 €.