Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by Philippe de Champaigne, Sébastien Bourdon and Pierre Patel. Bardelys, the richest and most fashionable man at Louis XIII's court, wagers his estates that he can marry a lady in Languedoc who has refused the King's favorite — and arrives in her country under another man's name, wounded, and is taken for a rebel. Sabatini spoke five languages and wrote in English by choice; this 1906 novel is the purest of his swashbucklers, and the wager turns out to be the least of his problems. Sixty plates after Rubens and Champaigne show the courts, convoys and bivouacs of seventeenth-century France, the very world Bardelys rides through.