They were the children of France's most celebrated men of nineteenth-century letters and science, the celebrity heirs and heiresses of their day. Their lives were the subject of scandal, gossip, and fascination. Léon Daudet was the son of the popular writer Alphonse Daudet. Jean-Baptiste Charcot was the son of the famed neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, mentor to a young Sigmund Freud. And Jeanne Hugo was the adored granddaughter of the immortal Victor Hugo. As France readied herself for the dawn of a new century, these childhood friends seemed poised, more than most, for greatness.

In Gilded Youth, Kate Cambor paints a portrait of a generation lost in upheaval. As France weathered social unrest, violent crime, the birth of modern psychology, and the dawn of World War I, these three young adults experienced the disorientation of a generation forced to discover that the faith in science and progress that had sustained their fathers had failed them.

With masterful storytelling, Cambor captures the hopes and disillusionments of those who were destined to see the golden world of their childhood disappear and the universal challenges that emerge as the dreams of youth collide with the reality of experience.

Read an excerpt from Gilded Youth. (You can read an excerpt in French in the August/September 2009 issue of Lire magazine here.)


What people are saying about Gilded Youth:

  • “Gilded Youth” is full of glittering things — ideas, salons, dreams — ultimately blinding to the three young people. Paris burns brightly in the background.” — Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

  • “[Cambor] succinctly and masterfully offers an illuminating glimpse into belle époque realities through the experiences of three childhood friends destined to do great things, who later saw the golden world of their childhoods disappear . . . This fascinating volume is highly recommended to a broad readership in 19th and 20th century French studies and literature.” — Library Journal
  • “This is a Proust lover's idea of a sexy read: the tale of the offspring of three of belle epoque Paris's most celebrated figures—with a hint of glamour, scandal and approaching doom.” — Sarah F. Gold, Publisher's Weekly

  • “A beautiful writer, [Cambor] crafts biographical detail into lucid prose illuminating a universal story of childhood dreams wilting under the dry, burning sun of reality.” — David Luhrssen, Express Milwaukee

  • “Kate Cambor's Gilded Youth reads like a Balzac novel. The reader is enchanted by young Charcot and by Victor Hugo's granddaughter, and comes to loathe the odious Leon Daudet, archetype of all French anti-Semites. This book is at once a marvelous narration and a dark vision of the anxieties of familial influence.” — Harold Bloom

  • “Gilded Youth is a mesmerizing account which combines biography and history of the highest order. Cambor combines a scholar's deep knowledge of French society and politics with a novelist's grasp of psychological nuance: the result is a story about how the most urgent dispositions of the human heart can be shaped by history.” — Christine Stansell, author of American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century

  • “Gilded Youth is the indispensable companion to Roger Shattuck’s classic, The Banquet Years. Drawn with grace, sympathy, and shining intelligence, the characters in Kate Cambor’s group portrait are more than engaging. To know them is to understand how their time--a time of great promise and unsurpassed beauty—gave way to a century of unending destruction.” — Patricia O’Toole, author of The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends and When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House.

  • “Gilded Youth is a fascinating insight into the long shadows cast by the famous upon their children. The lives of Daudet, Hugo and Charcot are proof that an exceptional heritage can be as much as a burden as a blessing. Kate Cambor has written a remarkable book." — Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire