Word: ansiau
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...Ansiau, knight and onetime Crusader, sets out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, becomes blind on the way, is captured in the Holy Land by the infidel and lashed to a mill which he is forced to turn like an ox. His son Herbert le Gros, a gay blade who lives life to the hilt, meanwhile sticks to the manor, takes all the land and love he can get, and happily commits incest with his wild and passionate half sister, who hates him ("I shall . . . make his blood rot, send snakes to drink his eyes, and leeches to suck his heart...
...romance show in painstaking detail how a young man of good family once lived, wedded and loved. Herbert's story is a chilling indication of what life could be like for serfs and the members of a noble family when the lord was hard, lewd and avaricious. Old Ansiau's pilgrimage, full of pathos and compassion, cuts to the heart of a century in which deep religious feeling and incredible brutality could exist side by side. In her novel (a Book-of-the-Month Club selection), Author Oldenbourg has woven a huge and intricate tapestry of a medieval...
...when King Louis the Young reigned in France and Henry the Open-handed held Champagne," Alis of Puiseaux, a 14-year-old who knew "all the things a girl of noble blood must know," was married off. Her groom was musclebound, thick-skulled, 16-year-old Ansiau of Linnieres. In the smoky manor of Linnieres, the two families gorged themselves on staggering quantities of meat and wine...
This plodding historical novel may possibly go like wildfire in the lending libraries, or even in Hollywood. The married life of long-suffering Alis and oafish Ansiau is described in great, sometimes tedious detail. Miss Oldenbourg's canvas is wide but her stitches are painstakingly small. Heroine Alis settles down to yearly pregnancies, frequent miscarriages, and incessant worries about the financial decline of the manor, the fruits of which her self-indulgent husband squanders on pomp, tournaments and the Crusades. Before old age, each has one fierce extramarital fling -and two bastards are added to the brood of infants...
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