Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by John Robert Dicksee, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Paul Delaroche. True episodes told as fiction: the murder of Rizzio in front of Mary Stuart; Darnley at Kirk o' Field; the Saint Bartholomew; the affair of the Queen's Necklace; Casanova's escape from the Leads. Sabatini spoke five languages and chose English because, he said, all the best stories are told in it; here he leaves invention aside and simply tells what the archives say, which turns out to be more improbable than Scaramouche. Sixty plates, from Turner's Rispah to Delaroche's Napoleon at Fontainebleau, range across four centuries to match Sabatini's own sweep through history.