I hated it (gave up during episode 1), but that owes a great deal to Druon. It's theatrical/unrealistic, melodramatic, stilted. No one ever talked the way Druon has his characters talk, and the minute you have real people say those lines, you see why. Then, there's the melodramatic plot. Both series (the very old one and the newer one) have similar acting styles (which is a bit the French equivalent to the acting style used in BBC productions like Henry IV or Elizabeth R... and isn't very natural to French. It works in drama, but in melodrama it sounds ridiculous). In the 2005 series it's just worse (to the point of being barely watchable, IMO) because they did try to mix that with a more "realistic" production. The old series felt just like filmed theatre. That's what French fans of the books expected, though, as it's Druon. To make a good series out of it (but would it be worth it, considering the melodramatic plot?), you'd need to change the tone completely, starting with the language. You can't do that with Les Rois Maudits - it's way too popular in both senses. The audience are by and large the readers, and they want their books. It's been done at least once with much success, for La Reine Margot, a fairly minor and no longer very read Dumas. But barely anything of the Dumas novel remained but the barebone plot. The tone, the language (inspired by Racine rather than Dumas), the focus and themes, Dumas's pov on the characters... everything was changed to turn it into a gritty, stylish tragedy.



I still think you should have started with a Folio or 10/18 of L'Écume des Jours or L'Arrache-Coeur before the Pléiade though (in part because the edition include ton of material of interest only to hardcore Vian fans, like all his early works, and most of volume 2 that has the Sullivan stuff). Just make sure to start with either some short stories or with L'Écume des Jours. If you read chronologically, you'll give up before reaching his four "real" novels. Go back to the rest later.



You've been mislead a bit about the language, I think. It's modern, give or take a few turns of phrases that are imitations in modern French of the medieval manner. For the rest, it's Druon, so it's 19th century prose in a modern form, not for historical reasons but because Druon loathed modern novelists, and was an arch-conservative regarding language. He wasn't of the school of thought that admire how fast French has always evolved, in all eras. He wasn't called a dinosaur for no reason.



I found his random peppering of old words and the occasional archaic turns of phrase was extremely annoying, if not exactly for the same reasons as you (more than clumsy, I found that pedantic: "oh unwashed masses, here's an old word for your education" - and misleading). The worst in that it's not medieval French. It's French as it never existed: modern sentences, with an old conjuction, adverb or substantive used as the modern grammar or syntax dictate. Using forms in -ois just occasionally and just for certain words is abysmally stupid (and totally misleading for most readers, beside). That's just the very same word Anglais, with the pre-revolution française spelling. -oi was pronounced -ais (or a bit more like â) before the Bourbons/late Valois. By the renaissance, the nobles pronounced the sound as -oi, the lower classes kept to -ais. With the revolution the -ais of the peasantry became the proper, educated way to pronounce the terminal sound, and as the oi sound within words existed, the Académie Française introduced the spelling -ais, closer to the phonetics (had Druon been there, he would have argued it should be written ois and pronounced as ais).

As for moult (now restricted to rare literary uses), that's also the post-medieval uniformized spelling, and used by Druon in modern sentences, not in the medieval syntax. In real medieval texts, you see it often as molt or moulte or molte, and often as an adverb.

Druon's language was his own bastard and clumsy creation that's a great deal more to do with affections of the 19th century than anything else. Mimicking real medieval language would be both pointless and impractical (using it, near impossible) - it's a different language (rather a series of closely connected dialects), partly declined like latin and with a very different grammar and syntax (the use of verbs in particular is very different from modern French). Beside, most texts still existing are versified, not in prose, so there's quite a bit of guess work going about the differences between literary and casual medieval French. Except for very simple texts it's difficult to read (especially with the original spelling), because there were tons of regional differences, the state of the language shifted a lot through the centuries and there's the additional difficulty that the modern French substantives (the masculine forms, anyway) most often come from the complement forms, not from the subject case form. The word Roi for e.g. comes from the Ré/Roy complement form, the subject case form was Rex. It's easier with a basic knowledge of latin (though if it's only classical latin, not as much. Its influence on French vocabulary came later).

You have medieval French used occasionally in movies, for instance if there are just a few scenes set in the period in the film, or in documentaries. It's much easier to understand verbally than in written form, but it's still subtitled.



Rather wanting you to think he did, except in the notes. He was showing off, of he thought he was setting a properly medieval mood by using a few words like that (and yes, it does fool many readers (Druon isn't much read by the intellectual types, you'll understand), who think this was medieval language. Jeez, I've heard that comment as often as I've heard stupid notions about History picked from Druon's inventions (I remember in particular an heated argument with a younger cousin about the switcheroo. She ended up screaming at me I was a know-it-all and to read Druon if I didn't believe her! It's widely known in modern times that one should never trust Dumas, but Druon and his pretenses and footnotes, not so much)

I don't remember the notes much, except I was really pissed when later I started to read French History and realized Druon had thrown historical notes at me, making it look scholarly and faithful to the facts, all the while fixing it all up with inventions and rumors/anecdotes left and right to spice his plot up. Give me good old honest Dumas and his "I rape History, but don't it produce beautiful children?" any time. In my book, Druon isn't far from a fraud, with the caveat he never claimed he kept close to the truth, just made choices like using footnotes like an Historian that mislead the reader to think his novels were a faithful and scholarly fictionalization of History.




Exactly. Imagine reading that as a kid and discovering much later it was all mostly fiction...

The Dan Brown comparison is a fair one, though in terms of literary standing and its place in pop culture, Les Rois Maudits is a bit more like WOT/Robert Jordan (a pedantic version of Jordan, anyway - in personality the two men were nothing alike).





Actually, they're an immensely popular cash-cow for a publisher and seem to enjoy a sudden wave of popularity every generation for a while (the last time it happened, it was followed a few years later by the new tv series). I have a hardcover omnibus from the early 80s. There's just no hardcover edition available now (and not for a while, the current publisher doesn't have a hardcover collection).

By the way, pretty much all of French big historical sagas suck (not that anglophone popular historical fiction are masterpieces either, the flaws seem inherent to the genre). There are good historical novels for sure (L'Oeuvre au Noir, for instance), but the big historical romans-fleuve is a genre that peaked with the likes of Dumas, Hugo. The other really famous and popular modern medieval series beside Les Rois Maudits is Bourin's La Chambre des Dames. It's better, more realistic and better researched (and with mostly fictitious characters, not historical figures), but still pretty much pop. lit.





Admin edit by Legolas: fixed the quotes to make this more readable.