Madeleine de Scudéry is a paragon of paradox: so passionate that she is accused of corrupting an age of corruption, so prim that her enemies snidely nickname her the "Virgin of the Marais."

Seventeenth-century France is a time of dark savagery and uncertainty. Yet Madeleine is able to create an intoxicating kingdom of her imagination, a world where the finest minds of the age choose to dwell. She becomes the best selling novelist in Europe for nearly a hundred years, but is forced by convention to publish under the name of her infuriating despot of a brother, achieving fame so great that he is elected to the Académie française. She is ridiculed and revered, honored by kings and queens and forced to live in poverty.

At the age of forty-five, she meets a brilliant young man fourteen years her junior and from that day on, they are either together or write to each other, including six years when he is imprisoned for treason. In the     pages of her vast novels, Madeleine writes eloquently against the            slavery of marriage and love, but her own life is one of the most           profound, enduring, and unlikely love stories in history.