Spanning nearly three quarters of a century, THE DU MAURIERS is the enthralling saga of a family of artists and speculators, courtesans and military men. From England to Paris and back again their fortunes vacilated as wildly as did their ambitions. Mary Anne Clarke, a fading beauty with a scandalous past, now exiled and obliged to live by her wits. Ellen, her daughter, reserved where her mother was brazen, chaste where her mother was amorous. Louis-Mathurin du Maurier, charming and good humored, a wastrel and dreamer of strange inventions impossible in early nineteenth-century Paris...this fascinating trio was the beginning of an extraordinary family of writers, artists and actors...the du Mauriers.