The Parma Legacy

This is the story of three fascinating women who live out the plights and delights of woman''s estate in seventeenth-century France. Noble Catherine peasant Martine bourgeois Angelique are locked together by circumstances in their separate searches for identity. All three suffer from the social pressures of a class-ridden age and all three must learn the cruel limits to women''s horizons in one of the most male-chauvinistic periods in history. The try each in her own way to transcend these limits even as they fall in love and year for glory God a high-born husband money or sometimes just a good time. For while the objectives of the three women coincide in Gaspard handsome but worthless a man who feeds the illusions of the spiritual Catherine offers his name to Angelique for a price and provides Martine with the legitimacy her child needs. A mysterious treasure the pearls of Parma gleams through the story. A river of pearls with a life and history of their own. Where are they? Who wants them? What secrets will they reveal of birth inheritance and power? Finally the pearls provide an important key.