His Wife, His Art, His Madness

Coco is an orphan raised in the Crown Prince's household, sickly and without standing of her own. On the day she enters the palace she stumbles and falls into the arms of Gaspard Giraud, the Grand Secretary, in front of witnesses. Her reputation is ruined, and he marries her at once. For three years he keeps his distance. She decides he is ashamed of where she came from, and to work off the resentment she writes an anonymous serial called The Grand Secretary's Wife, which sells everywhere in the capital. Gaspard begins hunting for the author. Coco breaks into his study to burn the evidence, collapses there from her old illness, and he nurses her himself with a care she has never seen from him. On a southern tour she drinks too much and says more than she meant to, and in the aftermath she learns he has been dosed with a drug by someone in his own circle. Then she becomes convinced he arranged the death of her friend, and she runs to his private house in the south. The walls of one room are covered with hundreds of painted portraits of her, each one signed by his hand, "to my wife." Rebels catch her on the road. Gaspard trades away his most valuable ally to get her back and cuts down the rest himself. The shock brings back what she had forgotten: she was born to a southern noble house, she saved him when they were children, and her family was wiped out for sheltering his. The carriage accident and the marriage proposal were both arranged by him.