The Count of Sainte-Hélène, or The Lure of Infamy: A Novel of the Bourbon Restoration - Softcover

Robert Blumenfeld is the author of Accents: A Manual for Actors (1998; Revised and Expanded Edition, 2002); Acting with the Voice: The Art of Recording Books (2004); Tools and Techniques for Character Interpretation: A Handbook of Psychology for Actors, Writers, and Directors (2006); Using the Stanislavsky System: A Practical Guide to Character Creation and Period Styles (2008); Blumenfeld’s Dictionary of Acting and Show Business (2009); Blumenfeld’s Dictionary of Musical Theater: Opera, Operetta, Musical Comedy (2010); Stagecraft: Stanislavsky and External Acting Technique—A Companion to Using the Stanislavsky System (2011); Teach Yourself Accents: The British Isles (2013); Teach Yourself Accents: North America (2013); Teach Yourself Accents: Europe (2014); and the collaborator with noted teacher and acting coach Alice Spivak on the writing of her book How to Rehearse When There Is No Rehearsal: Acting and the Media (2007)—all published by Limelight Editions. He lives and works as an actor, dialect coach, and writer in New York City, and is a longtime member of Equity, and SAG-AFTRA. He has worked in regional and New York theaters, as well as in television and independent films. For ACT Seattle he played the title role in Harwood’s The Dresser, and he has performed many roles in Shakespeare and Chekhov. In an Off-Broadway season of six Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas for Dorothy Raedler’s American Savoyards (under the name Robert Fields), he played the Lord Chancellor and other patter-song roles. He created the roles of the Marquis of Queensberry and two prosecuting attorneys in Moisés Kaufman’s Off-Broadway hit play Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, and was also the production’s dialect coach, a job that he did as well for the Broadway musicals, Saturday Night Fever and The Scarlet Pimpernel. Mr. Blumenfeld currently records books for Audible. He has recorded more than 320 Talking Books for the American Foundation for the Blind, including a bilingual edition of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, in Beckett’s original French and the playwright’s own English translation. He received the 1997 Canadian National Institute for the Blind’s Torgi Award for the Talking Book of the Year in the fiction category, and the 1999 Alexander Scourby Talking Book Narrator of the Year Award in the fiction category. He holds a BA in French from Rutgers University and an MA from Columbia University in French language and literature.

As the novel opens, the “charming, if slightly obsequious” Count of Sainte-Hélène, along with King Louis XVIII and other French elites, is watching a play about the abdication of Mary, Queen of Scots. The upheaval depicted onstage reflects the novel’s 1816 setting, in which the Bourbons have been newly restored to the throne, one year after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and 27 years after the start of the French Revolution. The era’s social confusion has allowed the class structure to become more fluid than usual: Vidocq, the police detective, has his own history of criminality and prison escapes, and the aristocrats who frequent the king’s court don’t always have the highborn lineages they proclaim. When robbers strike the homes of some of those aristocrats, as well as the government’s Central Records Office, Vidocq is tasked with uncovering the mastermind, who appears to have an insider’s knowledge of the burgled homes. The disguise-loving Vidocq well knows, however, that appearances can be deceiving. The first scene’s setting is apt, as Blumenfeld’s novel is highly theatrical, adding fine flourishes to both its historical figures and its fictional characters. The king’s obsessive gluttony, a duchess’s strangely insightful malapropisms and a baron’s clueless seduction tactics (“Kiss me, my stuffed cabbage!”) would make any comedic actor exuberant. The novel’s third act centers on a series of trials, and the overall tension starts to dissipate as those trials progress; nonetheless, they would still make for vivid scenes on a lavishly designed stage. The author can sometimes be a bit showily clever and overly explanatory, as when he describes a man “whose moustache and beard hid not only his extreme probity, for he was the soul of honesty, but also his ruthless cunning, for he was the epitome of rapacity.” But his style is also precise, classic and witty, and an admirably faithful homage to 19th century French greats.

A lively ode to the classics, and to the twin delights of mischief and mayhem.