The original novel was published in 2020. Translated by Françoise Bui.
A fiery heroine seeks vengeance against a royal court of deadly vampires in this epic alternate history set in lavish Versailles.
Louis XIV transformed from the Sun King into the King of Shadows when he embraced immortality and became the world’s first vampire. For the last three centuries, he has been ruling the kingdom from the decadent Court of Shadows in Versailles, demanding the blood of his subjects to sate his nobles’ thirst and maintain their loyalty.
In the heart of rural France, commoner Jeanne Froidelac witnesses the king’s soldiers murder her family and learns of her parents’ role in a brewing rebellion involving the forbidden secrets of alchemy. To seek her revenge, Jeanne disguises herself as an aristocrat and enrolls in a prestigious school for aspiring courtiers. She soon finds herself at the doors of the palace of Versailles.
But Jeanne, of course, is no aristocrat. She dreams not of court but of blood.
The blood of a king.
The series
In the world of Vampyria, the Sun King never died. In 1715, Louis XIV chose immortality instead, transforming himself into a vampire and condemning Europe to an eternal age of darkness. Three centuries later, Versailles still glitters, the aristocracy still rules, and ordinary mortals pay a blood tax to sustain the undead elite.
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At the center of Victor Dixen's dark alternate history is Jeanne Froidelac, a young commoner whose family is destroyed by the king's forces. With little left except her anger and a dangerous secret, Jeanne assumes the identity of a noblewoman and enters the world of Versailles. Her purpose is not to join the immortal court but to survive it long enough to strike at the ruler who created it.
That deception places her inside a society built on blood, privilege, and appearances. The palace remains dazzling on the surface, filled with elaborate etiquette, extravagant fashions, rivalries, and ambition, but beneath its golden halls lies a brutal order in which vampires occupy the highest ranks and humans exist largely to serve them. Every step Jeanne takes deeper into court brings opportunity, but also the possibility that someone will discover who she really is.
The series gradually pushes beyond Versailles into the hidden corners of Paris and eventually across the Atlantic, widening its vision of a world whose history has been frozen by immortal rulers. Secret societies, alchemy, rebellion, piracy, forbidden magic, and rival supernatural powers complicate Jeanne's original desire for revenge as she discovers that bringing down the vampire monarchy may demand more than simply reaching the king.
Dixen draws heavily on the imagery of Louis XIV's France while twisting it into Gothic fantasy. The result combines vampire horror and alternate history with court intrigue, adventure, romance, and the extravagant atmosphere of the Baroque era. Familiar historical institutions become sinister reflections of themselves: aristocratic privilege is made literal through immortality, political power is maintained through blood, and Versailles becomes both a magnificent palace and a carefully decorated cage.
Jeanne's double identity gives the Vampyria Saga much of its tension. She must learn to move among the very creatures she hates, wearing the manners and appearance of an aristocrat while secretly working against the society she appears desperate to join. As that disguise becomes harder to separate from the person beneath it, her struggle grows into something larger than revenge, a battle over freedom, identity, and who has the right to shape the future of a world that has been trapped in the past for three hundred years.
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