Synopsis

Louise (1555-1620), on the night of St. Bartholomew in August 1572, lost her father, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, her husband, and an unknown number of friends and relatives in a cruel way. In Paris, as throughout France, religious wars alternated with fragile periods of peace. The seventeen-year-old Huguenot noblewoman, raised in a cultured and passionate family, escaped the massacre by taking refuge in the English embassy. An exile like many others, she fled to Savoy, Switzerland, and returned home as soon as possible. At the age of twenty-eight, William the Silent proposed to her; she accepted and set out for the Netherlands. The Silent was a man of age and charm, the son of Erasmus rather than Luther, yet willing to follow the Calvinists if the country's liberation from the Spanish was at stake. After the birth of her only son, Louise loses William, killed by an assassin, and her life seems to fade away. However, her curiosity about humanity, her active intelligence, and her awareness of the opportunities inherent in her role allow her to rise in the esteem, if not affection, of the Dutch, who detest France. Upon his father's death, her son Maurice saves the northern provinces from the Spanish, and in doing so, he allies himself with the most intransigent faction of the Calvinist movement, dividing the country. Louise finds herself once again on the wrong side, but seems unaware of it and works to defend the newly persecuted.