Line of Love

The Line of Love (1913) is a collection of comic fantasy tales by James Branch Cabell. Set in a world where history and fantasy collide, where a lowly swineherd can rise to be Count of Poictesme, The Line of Love is one of Cabell’s best-known works of fiction, and is included in a series of novels, essays, and poems known as the Biography of the Life of Manuel.“It is a tale which they narrate in Poictesme, telling how love began between Florian de Puysange and Adelaide de la Forêt. They tell also how young Florian had earlier fancied other women for one reason or another; but that this, he knew, was the great love of his life, and a love which would endure unchanged as long as his life lasted.” On the night of his wedding to the lovely Adelaide de la Forêt, Florian de Puysange has a strange feeling that something is missing. Stepping outside to gather his wits about him, he remembers his dear friend Tiburce, dead for five years. At that moment, his comrade appears before him, alive but with an alien tone to his voice. Recalling the pact they made to drink in celebration of whomever married first, Florian wanders into the garden to make good on his promise. Set in a fictionalized France of the 13th century, The Line of Love is a captivating collection of tales and legends from a mythical world not so different from our own. Cabell’s work has long been described as escapist, his novels and stories derided as fantastic and obsessive recreations of a world lost long ago. To read The Line of Love, however, is to understand that the issues therein—the struggle for power, the unspoken distance between men and women—were vastly important not only at the time of its publication, but in our own, divisive world. This edition of James Branch Cabell’s The Line of Love is a classic of fantasy and romance reimagined for modern readers.

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