Staunch royalists but also devoted Huguenots, the men assemble a loyal community around them, but are challenged as religious unrest, poverty and famine threaten their way of life and push the country into chaos.

As of January 2021, Pushkin Press has no plans to move forward with translating and publishing the remaining nine volumes of the series in English.

[citation needed] Kline, a fan of the series, submitted his translation on spec to Pushkin, where editor Daniel Seton was surprised to find that such an "undiscovered gem" had been thus far overlooked in the UK.

[5] Merle wrote the 500-page novels of his Fortune de France series "using many of the idioms and speech rhythms of that period, some of them taken from the region of Périgord".

[4] James Kirkup noted in The Independent: Merle was a genuine scholar of language, and believed that the atmosphere of an era could not be expressed without many interventions of regional dialects and quaint usages of the times.

[4] Pushkin Press editor Daniel Seton suggests that Merle's own experiences in World War II influenced Fortune de France novels, saying "There is quite a clear antiwar stance.

While there is plenty of action and swordplay, the protagonist is generally horrified by the descent of his country into civil war and the cruelty shown by both sides, Protestants and Catholics, during the conflict.

"[1] Toby Clements of The Telegraph wrote, "There are set-piece discussions on the dilemmas of faith that are informative if not the stuff of high drama, and passages on the history of France that can only be made sense of with the aid of a map and a memory for names.