The Devil’s Laughter

Jean Paul Marin, the hero of Frank Yerby’s new novel, is
as turbulent and unpredictable, as strange a mixture of idealism and hatred, as
the French Revolution itself, in the thick of which he lives and loves and
pursues his feuds.

Four years in the Comte de
Gravereau’s private prison have left a scar on his forehead and a deeper
invisible one in his heart. Indeed the Comte is to be the baleful genius of
Jean’s life.

Three women, so utterly
different, are caught up in Jean’s passionate career— glamorous, tawny-haired,
treacherous Lucienne; Nicole, the Comte’s sister, delicate and blonde, whom
Jean loves as much as he hates her brother, and Fleurette, more beautiful than
either—beautiful with great calm and sweetness, but blind.

Jean, the public figure who rode
high on the tide of a revolution he was finally to regret, and became the
intimate of Danton himself, and Jean, the private citizen, with his veerings
between good and evil, is Mr. Yerby’s masterpiece; fatally easy to love, hard
to understand and harder still to forget. The Devil’s Laughter has all the
romance and colour which Yerby’s many admirers would expect from the author of
the brilliantly successful A Woman Called Fancy and The Foxes of
Harrow.