The House of the Wolves
Volume 1 : The Cursed Room
A powerful and entrancing novel
December 1500. At the foot of the ramparts of Montguerlhe castle, under the frozen moon, lies a young girl. She is bloody and unconscious. Because she was too beautiful and because she refused to submit to the lust of her master, lord François de Chazeron, he had her husband hanged immediately after their wedding, and then raped her, beat her and branded her with hot iron.
But he made a mistake in throwing her to the wolves. For she was not an ordinary young girl. The women in her family are endowed with strange powers. Some of them, like Isabeau, can talk to wolves. Others, like her sister Albérie, are transformed on nights of the full moon… And from then on, these two women, as well as little Loraline, the issue of this vile rape, live only for one thing : vengeance !
Isabeau, Albérie and Loraline, all hardened by their suffering and their ordeals, are torn between their desire to live full lives and the thirst for vengeance which never leaves them. Their destiny takes us from the bowels of a fortress in the Auvergne to the ballrooms of the Louvre, from the slums of Paris, full of beggars and lepers, to the court of François Ier, from the prophecies of a child who will go on to become the famous Nostradamus to the search for the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone in the company of Paracelsus …
Mingling alchemy, sensuality and cruelty, The House of the Wolves plunges us into a whirling eddy of passions and adventures. Here, as in Aliénor’s Bed, Mireille Calmel weaves the double thread of her plot from historical fact and forgotten legends. The supernatural appears in the lives of the characters so smoothly, so naturally and spontaneously, that the reader is convinced. This second novel confirms what we have already seen: this young woman has extraordinary talent.
