The Adorable Duchess (Allen and Unwin, 12s. 6d.) is to
all intents and purposes a historical novel. Some historic characters seem to have slipped out of fiction into the actual past. Such a character is the Duchesse de Berri. In 1816 she married the Due de Berri, heir-apparent to the Throne of France. He was assassinated in the threatre and she bore him a posthumous son. After that the escapades and adventures of this high-spirited, light-minded, indefensible, and "ador- able " Neapolitan, beggar description. The reader finds himself with her a happy prisoner in a large castle, a trembling, suffocating captive in a cupboard, a court lady, a fish out of water in a stiange country, drunk with the joy of adventure or weeping over the death of ambition. It all makes a very good story, which is by no means to say that it is bad history.
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