The Carlovingian Coins Or, The Daughters of Charlemagne

Sue, Eugène, 1804-1857Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.1
Word count
249K words
Chapters
25

Tags

English Originals Historical Fiction Historical ReappraisalFate and FortunePalace IntrigueFamily FeudPower Game19th Century

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Carlovingian Coins; Or, The Daughters of Charlemagne by Eugène SueAuthor: Sue, Eugène, 1804-1857,Language: English, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Jun 29, 2010

Editor's review

This is a historical novel by the French popular novelist Eugène Sue, set in the late Carolingian court and centering on Charlemagne's daughters and coinage. A nineteenth-century French work, it is closer to popular adventure fiction with historical coloring than to rigorous historiography. Its value lies in letting readers experience the narrative rhythm of nineteenth-century French popular historical fiction: dense plotting, sharply divided good and evil characters, and imaginative depictions of court life interwoven throughout. The free English e-book from Project Gutenberg makes searching and comparative reading easy, suiting it as supplementary material for understanding Eugène Sue's work or for studying the reception history of nineteenth-century historical fiction. Those expecting primary sources or modern historical research should adjust their expectations. It is well suited to chapter-by-chapter reading in fragmented settings like commutes or travel, and can be read alongside Charlemagne-related historical sources to discern the boundary between literary imagination and historical fact.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the opening background setup first to clarify the characters and their relationship to Charlemagne's family before entering the plot.
  2. Read the court descriptions against reliable historical sources and mark the fictional elements.
  3. Use the e-book's search function to note the recurring coinage motif and observe its narrative role.
  4. Read two or three chapters at a time and take brief notes to avoid fatigue from the long popular plot.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25

FAQ

Is this book historical research or a novel? It is a historical novel by Eugène Sue, with a plot set against the Carolingian dynasty and steeped in popular romance. Its characters and events are literarily processed and cannot be used as historical sources; to learn about Charlemagne's era, consult authoritative histories alongside it.
How difficult is the English e-book? As an English translation of a nineteenth-century French work, its sentences run long and the narrative pace is slow, with some historical terms requiring verification. Readers with college-level English can finish it with a dictionary and search function; complete beginners may find it difficult.
Why recommend reading it alongside historical sources? The novel's imaginative depictions of the court and character relationships can easily be confused with historical fact. Reading against reliable sources lets you enjoy the literary invention while training your ability to distinguish historical narrative from literary embellishment, making the reading experience more well-rounded.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Sue, Eugène, 1804-1857 Author

Eugène Sue (1804–1857) was a French novelist best known for his serial novels. His masterpiece Les mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris) is set among the poor of Paris and depicts the extremes of wealth and poverty and the darker side of urban life, causing a great sensation in the mid-nineteenth century; his other series, Les mystères du peuple (The Mysteries of the People), uses historical narrative to express social criticism. The library holds sixty-six of his works, mostly volumes and English translations of these two series, showing that he wrote chiefly long serial fiction focused on social issues and historical legend. Public information is limited, so details of his life cannot be expanded here, but his works reveal a talent for presenting social reality in a popular, dramatic style that influenced later social novels and serial literature.