The first part of the novel "The Confession of the Marquise" is included in the latest volume of the illustrated collected works of Alexandre Dumas. It is the story of an extraordinary woman of the 18th century, Marie de Chamrond, Marquise de Dufan. Her life was full of elegant twists and intricate turns; she easily and gracefully befriended free thinkers and philosophers, played cat and mouse with courtly adventurers and the powerful of the world. Deciding in her old age to tell the whole truth about her time, she begins to dictate scandalous memoirs, in which she sincerely and somewhat unabashedly reveals many secrets of the Regency and Louis XV era, discusses her acquaintance with Voltaire and Beaumarchais, Diderot and Rousseau, and recounts the glorious and inglorious prototypes of the heroes of their immortal works, among whom, of course, was herself.
