Reviews for Count Hannibal. A Romance of the court of France

The average rating for Count Hannibal. A Romance of the court of France based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-11-17 00:00:00 Christian Leu This guy really knew how to write historical fiction. Count Hannibal de Tavannes is a delicious anti-hero, a prominent and dreaded aristocrat of Charles' IX inner circle, a merciless hatchetman with a icy cool demeanour taken to sneering with a 'look of smiling possession'. Mademoiselle Vrillac is a young Huguenot woman from the country come to Paris with her less than faithful lover, the foppish yet courageous Tignonville. Tavannes takes a liking to her and together they play out a deadly game of honour and wills against the backdrop of one of the darkest days in French history, the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572. Weyman recreates that violent and shameful episode with all the bloodthirsty glee of Alexander Dumas at his best, revelling in all the bloodthirsty details such as in the following passage: 'Near the Rue des Lombards he saw a dead child, stripped stark and hanged on the hook of a cobbler's shutter. A little farther on in the same street he stepped over the body of a handsome young woman ... To obtain her bracelets, her captors had cut off her hands; afterwards'but God knows how long afterwards'a passer-by, more pitiful than his fellows, had put her out of her misery with a spit, which still remained plunged in her body.' Tavannes ignores his orders from Charles - the highly strung young monarch himself puts in a memorable cameo - to play his game of cat and mouse with the woman he craves, she for the lives of various Huguenots he promises to spare, he for her promise to be his, body and soul. Considering that Tavannes is a bad man who could simply have taken what he wanted at anytime, I have to admit that once or twice the fine balance of their personal duel threatened to lose credibility, only for Weyman to rescue the situation with a subtle twist or a clever line. He still could have lost me to some degree even up to the last chapter, but the ending could not have been staged any better.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-09-27 00:00:00 Mark Davis more twists and turns than... a windy banister going around a spiral slide.