A castle locked in time, before the Revolution turned France to a bloodbath . . .A young girl, married off to a ducal collector of exotic birds . . .A boy enslaved, torn from his homeland, finding another path to power . . .A child, bound to break her family's ancient curse . . . .The lady's maid Berthe sees it all with her sharp eyes . . . and silently keeps her own secret.Eighteenth-century France is the setting-a time and place where age-old superstitions shadow an age of enlightenment, where the minuet of aristocratic life is deaf to the approaching drumbeats of revolution, where elegance masks depravity and licentiousness makes a mockery of love. Against this background, Berthe Duvet, maid to Adele du Fourchet, later mme la duchesse de Malvoeux, tells her tale of a doomed society and of a family seeking to break a terrible curse. Vivid in its re-creation of a vanished age and delightfully iconoclastic in its view of women and history, The Porcelain Dove is a triumph of the imagination.