The Regent's Daughter
The conspiracy failed. The reckoning hasn't.
Paris, 1719. The Cellamare Conspiracy against Philippe d'Orléans, Regent of France, has collapsed — but its aftershocks are far from over. Dumas returns to the world of The Conspirators for a story of court intrigue tangled with real royal history: the Regent's own daughters, the ambitions still simmering among the plot's surviving sympathizers, and a young woman whose fate becomes entwined with the highest levels of a court still reeling from a conspiracy that very nearly succeeded.
Picking Up Where The Conspirators Left Off
Published in 1845, two years after The Conspirators, this novel returns Dumas and Maquet to the same turbulent Regency they had already dramatized once — but from a new angle, following the fallout of the failed Cellamare plot through the eyes of new characters bound up in the Regent's own household. The two novels were published together in at least one major English edition, part of a nine-volume Collier collection of Dumas's works from 1893, and have often been read as companion pieces ever since.
The Regent's real daughters were famous in their own time for their strong wills and unconventional lives — one, Louise Adélaïde, defied her family to become a nun and eventually Abbess of Chelles, while others were known for scandal and independence that shocked even a famously permissive court. Dumas draws on this real family drama, weaving his fictional plot around the genuine personalities and tensions of the Regent's own household.
A Regency Still Unsettled
Though the Cellamare conspirators were ultimately pardoned in real life by 1720, Dumas mines the tense years immediately afterward for drama: a court where loyalty is still suspect, old conspirators still nurse grievances, and the Regent himself — intelligent, permissive, and famously indulgent even toward his own children — must govern a kingdom that came closer to a coup than most of his contemporaries ever realized. That atmosphere of lingering suspicion gives the novel its tension, even without an active plot at its center this time.
A Companion Piece, Not Just a Sequel
Readers coming from The Conspirators will recognize the world immediately, even though this novel tells a largely self-contained story. Dumas returns to the same Regency court, the same lingering distrust between the crown and its nobility, and the same appetite for court intrigue laced with real history — proof that even a "minor" Dumas novel, sitting in the shadow of his most famous books, still carries the same historical texture and narrative energy.
First Published
1845, two years after its companion novel, The Conspirators.
Setting
Paris, 1719, in the immediate aftermath of the Cellamare Conspiracy.
Genre
Historical court drama, tracing the Regent's household through political fallout.
Companion To
The Conspirators (The Chevalier d'Harmental), set in the same Regency.