A fascinating true story based on formidable detective work in the archives.

Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator, Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology

A convincing recreation of a feverish period in French history . . . DeJean guides the reader sure-footedly through the labyrinth of financial and family law, low and high politicking and general skulduggery that characterised the era . . . A fascinating and original book whose central importance is to have captured the turmoil, confusion and sometimes sheer wickedness that accompanied the formation of early modern capitalism.

Financial Times

The tale of two 17th- and 18th-century French families, a story that begins as a fairy tale and ends as a nightmare.

Kirkus

[The Queen's Embroiderer] features guild-hopping, inheritance fraud, domestic abuse, eloping to England, sending toddlers to their deaths, locking the gates against the poor, and the occasional escape from a chain gang. There's an impressive depth of research-this is, as much as anything else, a mystery about the manipulation of record-keeping and identity . . . Some aspects of the wider upheaval are striking, as DeJean builds a credible picture of the mania of a nation becoming an empire: Monarchy as economy, war as opportunity, slavery as profit margin. . . . That there are so few loose ends in this two-century saga is a testament to DeJean's research.

NPR.org

Joan DeJean tells the strange story of the Magoulet and Chevrot families, who rose to prominence as financiers and embroiderers to the French court . . . and shows how love and money made uncomfortable bed-mates.

Recommended Reads, New Statesman

This exceptional and thoroughly researched book follows two prominent Parisian families from the 1600s to the French Revolution (1789-1799).

Piecework