A Knight in Paris by Barbara Cartland

Whoops, sorry about the glare ;)

“I hope never to see fear in your eyes again”

At the sound of gunfire, the horses reared and the carriage moved backwards. “It is an ambush!” Lynetta cried…

Piqued by her indifference, the most eligible bachelor, the Earl of Chantcliffe, sends a proposal of marriage to Elaine Dale and leaves at once for France to make some special purchases on her behalf.

At an old Chateau outside Paris he saves the lovely Lynetta de Marigny from certain death only for them both to face further perils when forced to pose as husband and wife at the glittering Court of Napoleon Bonaparte.

As Lynetta grows even more dependent on him in a strange and frightening world so the Earl realises his love for her increases hour by hour. But he is not a free man.

Even the very wheels under his carriage add to his torment as they echo ‘What about Elaine?’. To jilt his betrothed would cause a family scandal but how could he bear to lose Lynetta?

I enjoy books that have a backdrop of an actual historical event. Not books that have the event front and centre but where the characters’ lives are affected by what is happening around them. A Knight in Paris is set in 1803 during the time of the Treaty of Amiens – a peace treaty between France and Britain that lasted a little over a year.

Personally I think that our Earl is asking for everything that he gets (and way more because in the grand scheme of things he doesn’t really have to deal with an awful lot) by giving into the request *cough* demand *cough* from the woman he marries. What does she want him to do to ‘prove his love’ go to France and pick up some furniture for her. Because nothing screams ‘I love you and I want to marry you’ like sending the poor bloke off to a country your own had been at war with not all that long ago! He asks for it even more because he knows it is ridiculous but he still goes along with it anyway.

Lynetta, the heroine, is one of the more…watery heroines that I have read. She is very much the kind of girl who needs a big strong alpha male around. She has lived a very sheltered life which then turned into living in hiding when her parents were killed by revolutionaries. I didn’t really mind that she was the fawning type who needed looking after it was the way that she was constantly telling the Earl how smart he was. So fair enough he did use his smarts to keep them alive but really…(see above)

Napoleon and Josephine Bonaparte also make an appearance in this book when the Earl and Lynetta find themselves smack bang in the middle of the French court before they can leave for England. Got to love it.

So why is this one of my favourite Barbara Cartland books when I have just picked apart the main characters? I think it is because of the refreshing reversal in the character rolls. I am so used to reading in books about the heroine being in love with someone else and then the hero trying to persuade her that he is the guy for her it made a nice change to see the hero realise he had majorly screwed up. He had already proposed to the woman he stupidly thought himself in love with and then spends a wee while stewing over how he is going to get himself out of the engagement when he realises that she isn’t the love of his life. I wouldn’t have minded watching him panic and sweat for 50 more pages – because I’m not going to lie, the guy was an arrogant jerk at the beginning of the book.

“It is always a mistake to tease a woman about herself,” the Earl said. “It is a subject on which they have very little sense of humour.”