After the phenomenal success of Le Montespan (500,000 copies sold), comes this dark, true story that only Jean Teulé can tell…

“What a beautiful day!”, Alain de Monéys declares in the opening line of this novella. Little did he know it would his last, nor that it would end so violently.

Tuesday, August 16, 1870 – this young, well-meaning aristocrat goes to the neighboring village’s marketplace to purchase necessities for his less fortunate neighbors. He is a kind, intelligent, likeable, good man. Alain arrives in Hautefaye at 2pm. Two hours later, the crowd having gone mad, will have lynched, tortured, burned and eaten him.

How is such a horror even possible? How could a peaceful population be seized by such a barbaric frenzy in a matter of minutes? With terrifying precision, Jean Teulé reenacts each step of this atrocious crime that is one of the most shameful anecdotes in the history of 19th Century France.