Alexandre Dumas Auguste Maquet ~7 hr read

The mesmerist and alchemist Joseph Balsamo, the future Cagliostro, weaves his occult schemes through the doomed court of pre-Revolutionary France.

Alexandre Dumas's sweeping historical romance ('Joseph Balsamo') sets its magician-conspirator amid the intrigues of Louis XV's France, blending real history with mesmerism, prophecy, and secret societies. Grand, page-turning Dumas adventure with a supernatural charge. Read it for a master storyteller's tale of an occult schemer at the heart of a crumbling old regime.

In its time

Published in 1891, during the 1890s, wells arrives.

Reading it

~7 hr read (a novel-length work, settle in).