The Eleven

by Pierre Michon

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In The Eleven, Michon lets us into the world of Corentin, a painter shaped by—and who eventually shapes—history. Brought up among provincial aristocracy to become a favorite of Parisian society—his paintings are commissioned by Louis XV’s mistress—Corentin’s career rides the Tides of the French Revolution. His masterpiece, "The Eleven," is an enigmatic Last Supper, representing the eleven members of the Committee of Public Safety (including Robespierre and Saint Just) during the Reign of Terror. Corentin and company, his work of art, and the historical tableau of the French Revolution come to life in dazzling, even painterly, detail. A potent blend of fact and fiction, The Eleven is a beautifully written, astute meditation on the nature of history itself and the artist’s role in it.

Release date: December 21, 2012

Publisher: Archipelago

Print pages: 240

Sample

He was not tall, unobtrusive, but he held your attention with his fever- ish silence, his dark cheer, his alternately arrogant and oblique manner – grim, as they said. At least that was how he was seen later in life. None of that appears on the Würzburg ceilings, on the south wall of the Kaisersaal to be precise, in the wedding procession of Frederick Barbarossa, in the portrait Tiepolo left of him, when the model was twenty years old: he is there, so they say, and you can go see him, perched among a hundred princes, a hundred constables and ushers, as many slaves and merchants, porters, putti and animals, gods, merchan- dise, clouds, the four seasons and the four continents, and two incon- testable painters, the ones who assembled the world that way in its exhaustive recension and are nevertheless of the world, Giambattista