Also, at the beginning of each book are references to chapters that appear in the book.Table of Contents:#1 The Three Musketeers#2 Twenty Years After#3 The Vicomte de Bragelonne#4 Ten Years Later #5 Louise de la Valliere#6 The Man in the Iron Mask

    Writing with blood, sweat, tears and moral outrage, Bloy drew from anecdotes, news reports and his own experiences as a guerilla fighter to compose a fragmented depiction of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, told with equal measures of hatred and pathos, and alternating between cutting detail and muted anguish. From heaps of corpses, monstrous butchers, cowardly bourgeois, bloody massacres, seas of mud, drunken desperation, frightful disfigurement, grotesque hallucinations and ghoulish means of personal revenge, a generalized portrait of suffering is revealed that ultimately requires a religious lens: for through Bloy's maniacal nationalism and frenetic Catholicism, it is a hell that emerges here, a 19th-century apocalypse that tore a country apart and set the stage for a century of atrocities that were yet to come. Leon Bloy (1846-1917) was born to a freethinking yet stern father and a pious Spanish-Catholic mother in southwestern France. Nourishing anti-religious sentiments in his youth, his outlook changed radically when he moved to Paris and came under the influence of Jules-Amedee Barbey d'Aurevilly. In his subsequent years of writing pamphlets, novels, essays, poetry and a multi volume diary, Bloy earned his dual nicknames of "The Pilgrim of the Absolute" through his unorthodox devotion to the Catholic Church and "The Ungrateful Beggar" through his endless reliance on the charity of friends to support him and his family.

    These surreal, hallucinatory little sketches - Schwob's unique take on 3rd century BCE Greek poet Herodas' then-newly discovered mimes - first appeared in L’Écho de Paris in serialised form from July 19th 1891 to June 7th 1892. A key figure of the late 19th-century French symbolist movement, Schwob's best known work is perhaps The Book of Monelle - "an assemblage of fairy tales, nihilist philosophy, and aphorisms tightly woven into a tapestry of deep emotional suffering" - which is considered by many to have been the unofficial bible of the French Symbolist movement. Although not widely known today, Schwob's influence on the literary landscape of the 20th century was huge, not only in relation to the surrealist movement which would flourish in the decades following his death but also beyond, to such authors as William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roberto Bolaño.