Review:

Review, The Lost Seigneur by David Loux

The Lost Seigneur is David Loux’s second novel about the du Laux family, in which the story of its patriarch, Jean-Pierre, unfolds, from his imprisonment in late 17th C. France by a rogue priest seeking the whereabouts of those following the Cathar faith to his rescue years later and reunion with his son, Pierre, in colonial Pennsylvania. The novel moves seamlessly in time and place between the Toulouse area in southern France, the du Laux family ancestral homeland, and early 18th C. Penn’s Woods, near the western frontier, where Jean-Pierre’s son now lives with his family. The reader is immersed in the culture of each location: its social structure, cuisine, clothing, and how people live in their homes and communities, as well as the oppressive power of church and state. The continuing search for Cathars, long after they were thought to have been eliminated in the late 12thand early 13th C. at the behest of the Roman Church, brings Jean-Pierre into the novel. It is with his granddaughter, Magdalena, however, that the novel begins and ends. She is “a self-professed Cathar,” granddaughter of Eleanor, a Cathar parfaite, whom Eleanor’s sister Escarmonde has directed three Cathar adepts to watch over in colonial America. Thus, the story of the du Laux family is generational. It is also modern: the idea of faith; the flight from one’s homeland to hoped-for safety in a new land; the vulnerability of girls and women; violence in the name of religion; the mistreatment and extermination of indigenous peoples as the colonies are beginning to establish their own autonomy that will culminate decades later in revolution; the search for lost family and reunion; and the identities one assumes in the quest for selfhood. Indeed, the novel is imbued with hasard. Mr. Loux has rendered, with fine strokes, the story of a family, and the forces in the Old World and New that shaped it.

--MaryEllen Beveridge. Author of Permeable Boundaries.