Robespierre : the story of Victorien Sardou's play adapted and novelized under his authority

The story opens on a luminous summer night in 1775, when the quiet streets of Paris’s Marais quarter are draped in starlight and the Seine reflects the sky like a dark mirror. Inside the ivy‑clad Hôtel de Pont⑤ the stern Councillor Jacques Bernard Olivier de Pontivy works late, feverishly searching through a chaotic pile of papers for a missing legal opinion that could decide a critical debate in the King’s Parliament. His obsession with order is broken by the sudden arrival of his teenage daughter Clarisse, whose shy entrance and tentative smile clash with his rigid expectations.

Clarisse’s presence awakens a tender, uneasy dynamic between father and daughter, hinting at the personal tensions that run beneath the surface of their aristocratic life. As the Councillor chastises her for neglecting etiquette, the reader senses a fragile world poised on the edge of change—an intimate portrait of family, duty, and the quiet undercurrents that will soon stir the streets of Paris.