Spirited heroine Marie Fontaine, niece of a Parisian apothecary, keeps her head during the French Revolution while all about her are literally losing theirs. She watches in horror as Queen Marie-Antoinette—"the Widow Capet" as the citizens are now forced to call her—is carted in her tumbril amid the heartless jeers of the crowd down the rue Saint-Honoré to the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution. Sharing a prison cell with the future Empress Josephine, she survives to rejoice at the death of the hated Robespierre and to witness the triumph of the youthful Napoleon Bonaparte as he sees of the last of the bloodthirsty mobs with his famous "whiff of grapeshot". Napoleon is the love of her life, but how near will she come to possessing him? Dangers, double-crossings, imprisonments and executions succeed each other in the first installment of a thrilling trilogy by one of the finest historical novelists of our time.