French History - the King's Casket Girls

 When women had very limited choices

https://books2read.com/u/b5X7A7

Born in a brothel in Paris in the early 1700s, Madeleine's future had been decided by her courtesan mother and Madame Claudine. Her innocence at age fourteen would be sold to the highest bidder. She’d be treated as a usable and disposable toy to fulfill her patron’s every perverted desire until he tires of her. Then she’d become a courtesan to entertain anyone who visited the brothel.

Madeleine dreams of a better future. She runs away and finds temporary refuge in a convent, but she doesn’t have too many options when she turns eighteen. Either going back to the brothel, becoming a servant with an uncertain future, living her life as a nun, or becoming a filles à la cassette, one of the King’s Casket Girls, since no reputable man would marry her in France with nothing to her name. To escape her gloomy future, she sails to the New World with hopes for a better life.

What will her future hold? Will she find happiness?

A reader said

"I came across Restless Heart while researching short historical fiction about women navigating survival in 18th-century France and the French colonial world. What stopped me was the historical detail at the center of this story: the filles à la cassette, the King's Casket Girls, is a real and genuinely underwritten chapter of French history, and almost no contemporary fiction touches it. That is not a premise someone finds by accident.

The filles à la cassette is a piece of history that most readers have never encountered, and that is an asset, not a limitation. Readers who love underexplored corners of women's history and colonial-era survival narratives are an active and loyal audience, and they search for exactly this kind of story."

https://www.authorerikamszabo.com

Erika M Szabo is known for her diverse range of writings, which span historical fantasy, magical realism, cozy mysteries, sweet romance, and children's literature. Her writing style is both expressive and insightful, transporting readers into the depths of the characters' emotions.