Two orphaned sisters are caught up in the turmoil of the French Revolution, encountering misery and love along the way.

Katie Flynn was born in Norwich and attended Norwich High School, where she was extremely happy and extremely undistinguished. Published at the tender age of eight, in Enid Blyton's Sunny Stories, she joined a Writers’ Circle as an adult, publishing short stories, articles, etc; only turning to novels in 1971 because the postal strike cut off her main source of income! The historical research that Celia and Fidelis carried out to enable this story to be written is fascinating and the section about this work at the end of the novel is definitely worth reading. I have discovered online that the two ladies are speaking about the novel and the research behind it at Robespierre and Forget-not send Henriette and her lover, the Chevalier de Vaudrey, to the guillotine, for hiding de Vaudrey, an aristocrat, who returned to Paris to find her. However, Danton manages to obtain a pardon for them. After a race through the streets of Paris he just manages to save Henriette and offers her to the Chevalier, when the two orphans unite. A doctor restores Louise's sight, she approves marriage between Henriette and the Chevalier, and a better-organized Republic forms in France.

The Two Orphans, the English-language version of the play upon which the movie is based, had been a staple of the actress Kate Claxton. After the premiere at the original Union Square Theatre in 1874, she had performed it hundreds of times for various theatrical companies in New York, including the Brooklyn Theater (she was performing it there on the night of the infamous Brooklyn Theater Fire in 1876), and she had eventually acquired the US rights to the play. Khatyn, of course, is homonymous with the much more famous Katyn, the forest where the Soviets themselves had murdered up to twenty-two thousand captured Polish army officers during April and May of 1940. The responsibility for this terrible crime—a product of the dismemberment of Poland by Germany and by the Soviet Union in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—had still, at the time of the making of Come and See, not been officially owned up to by the Soviet authorities; and it’s possible indeed to see permission to make the film in the first place as a tactical move in the Soviets’ ongoing propaganda war with the West, as indeed many did upon its release. The Polish Katyn would not thereby be denied outright, but it would be relativized—“You talk of your Katyn, but we have a Khatyn as well!”—put into the wider context of the endemic terrorism that shadows pretty much every war. The movie uses several visual effects throughout to capture the emotion of its story, using monochromic filters of red, blue, green, yellow and sepia to show feeling with the silent action which is accompanied by music; the movie also uses fade-ins to achieve this effect.

The epic tale of two step-sisters, Henriette and Louise Girard, caught up in the storm of the French Revolution. Louise, the child of an aristocrat, was abandoned on the cathedral steps where Henriette's father found her and took her home to raise as their own. After Louise goes blind, Henriette takes her to Paris where she hopes her sight can be restored. They are separated however, with Louise taken in by an old hag who forces her to beg on the street. Henriette has met the handsome Chevalier de Vaudrey who, although an aristocrat, is kind and cares about his fellow man. With the advent of the revolution, both Henriette and de Vaudrey are sentenced to the guillotine and it left to Danton to plead their case. — garykmcd Meanwhile, fun loving New York socialite, Margaret Hays has grown bored of her Grand Tour Of Europe and decides to head home on the most famous steamer ever built—RMS Titanic.But as the ship sets sail for America, carrying two infants bearing false names, the paths of Marcella, Michael and Margaret cross and nothing will ever be the same again. O’Dell, 1970 p. 132-135: Griffith: “...we must exercise care not to exchange our good government of Bolshevism and license.” I am quite surprised that my interest was held throughout as the story does not appear to contain enough substance to fill a fairly lengthy book. It is to the author’s credit that she has managed to produce just that. The storyline itself was good but not great, and the characters themselves were well developed, presumably in line with the information that was available about them from 1912 when their story hit the headlines. This is not the kind of book I usually read, but I was drawn in by a combo of the Titanic on the cover and the bargain bin price I got it for new.