The Lost Seigneur
A Chateau Laux Odyssey, Book #2
by David Loux
The Lost Seigneur is a sequel to the award-winning Chateau Laux.
It is the story of Jean-Pierre du Laux, a nobleman in southern France, who was wrongly imprisoned during a time of religious intolerance and subsequently endeavors to return to his family. Many years have passed since he saw them, and his long incarceration has broken his health.
Any reunion would clearly have been impossible, without the unlikely help of a youthful companion that he meets along the way.
Meet the Laux family!
While multiple characters play key roles, the main characters of The Lost Seigneur are Magdalena Laux Kraymer, who lives in a château on the edge of the frontier in the American colony of Penn’s Woods, which we now know as Pennsylvania; and her grandfather, Jean-Pierre du Laux, who is a Protestant nobleman in southern France.
The book begins and ends with Magdalena, who is married to a colonial assemblyman and who has chosen to live alone rather than follow her husband to Philadelphia. Her conflict is two-fold. On the one hand she is challenged by her marital arrangements. On the other, she receives a letter announcing the imminent arrival of a grandfather that she didn’t know she had and is faced with the challenge of what to do with this information.
At the heart of the story and the catalyst for all that transpires is the odyssey of Seigneur Jean-Pierre du Laux, a man who suffered wrongful imprisonment during a time of religious intolerance and an incarceration that lasted for over thirty years. He left his French manoir on a visit to Versailles to protest the Dragonnades, which the king was using to coerce Protestant conversion to Catholicism, and never returned home.
His son, Pierre, who was Magdalena’s father, assumed the seigneur had abandoned both him and his mother, and blamed the seigneur for the mother’s subsequent death. Carrying this grievance with him, he fled to Penn’s Woods, where he married and started a family in an attempt at a new life.
After discovering that her grandfather was alive, Magdalena set about trying to reunite him with her family and Jean-Pierre shared this goal. After his long confinement, he sought to return to his wife and child, but there were both emotional and physical barriers to the success of this endeavor. Magdalena must contend with a father who blames the seigneur for the death of his mother, who was a Cathar; and Jean-Pierre must contend with an aging body and the additional burden of a health that has been broken by confinement. In addition to other things, he must decide which is more important, his position as a nobleman, with a legacy that went back hundreds of years, or his roles as husband and father.
An overarching storyline is the mass movement of European settlers to the American colonies, some for gainful employment, some as a means of escape, and some, as in the case of Jean-Pierre, as a way of restoring broken family ties. The settlers didn’t come to the colonies with a clean slate. They brought their religious, cultural and familial baggage with them, for better or for worse.
We think we are who we are, without truly knowing what that is. As children, we need parents and institutions to tell us what to do and how to do it in order to survive. The voices of parents, teachers and religious leaders rebound in whatever conscious awareness that we have. As adults, however, we have the opportunity, if not an obligation, to reason for ourselves, and much of the conflict resolution in The Lost Seigneur has to do with the decisions that various members of the Laux family make.
David Loux
He lives in the Eastern Sierra with his wife, Lynn.
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