Beau Tancrede — Alexandre Dumas

The nobility of France was cut up by three men: Louis the Eleventh, Richelieu, and Robespierre. Louis the Eleventh overthrew the great vassals; Richelieu decimated the great lords; and Robespierre annihilated the aristocracy.

The first prepared the way for sole monarchy, the second for absolute monarchy and the third for constitutional monarchy.

But the events that Dumas is about to relate occurred between the years 1708 and 1716. Dumas leaves to the historian the appreciation, under their social relations, of the acts of the butcher king, and the deeds and crimes of a guillotining tribunal, to take a rapid survey of the condition of Paris and the provinces twenty years after the death of Richelieu - at the commencement of the eighteenth century.