The Lost Seigneur by David Loux Reviewed by Mark Zvonkovic

The Lost Seigneur by David Loux

Reviewed by Mark Zvonkovic

Publisher: Wire Gate Press

Publication Date: October 7, 2025

ISBN: 978-1954065048

Pages: 210

In Faulkner’s famous novel, The Sound and the Fury, Caddy falls from purity, her story told over two decades by her three brothers. In Michael Cunningham’s brilliant The Hours, three women, beginning with Virginia Woolf, examine the lives they’ve endured. A multitude of narrators in A Visit From The Goon Squad struggle with the tragedies and the redemptions that reoccur from the passage of time. Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden explores events that shape three family members through their perspectives glimpsed over a century. Such multi-character points of view are uncommon in modern literary novels. They offer a delicious character driven alternative to the last decade’s trend toward action-plotted books that are now the darling of big publishers. David Loux’s The Lost Seigneur eschews the modern shallow trend, displaying a breathtaking character development hard to find in today’s book marketplace.

The story travels back and forth chronologically and geographically between southern France during the time of King Louis XIV’s Dragonnades in the later years of the seventeenth century and several decades later in American colonial Pennsylvania. The novel’s eighteen chapters incorporate points of view from five characters, the most significant being those of a grandfather and his granddaughter. Jean Pierre, the grandfather, is kidnapped in pays cathare France by a rogue cardinal intent on bringing a suspected Cathar before the Inquisition. The hidden Cathar is  Eleanor, Jean Pierre’s wife. Jean Pierre, called the “seigneur,” is imprisoned for many years, and upon his release begins a quest to find his family, which unknown to him at the time includes Magdalena, a granddaughter who resembles Eleanor. Magdalena, the granddaughter, comes of age in Pennsylvania, embracing principles much like Eleanor’s, and enters into a platonic marriage in order to avoid colonial cultural norms.

The narrative and chronological shifts in The Lost Seigneur create nuanced portraits of two generations of Jean Pierre’s family. A similar presentation is incorporated into William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner’s story is divided into sections told by relatives and a servant. The story takes place on specific days that are eighteen years apart, which provides non-linear, disjointed perspectives, similar to those used by Loux in his separation of characters and decades between France and colonial Pennsylvania. The characters in both books espouse brilliantly subtle observations that, like a jigsaw puzzle, make little sense until put into the whole. Faulkner’s Quentin states at one point, while reflecting on the sound of a clock, that “You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear.” Loux’s Magdalena, upon first meeting her lost grandfather and looking into his eyes, observes, “A light bloomed in them⎯not the kind of light that shows the way but one that brightens what lies behind, the kind of illumination that is most terrible because it reveals what has been lost.” One often does not realize the significance of an event until the passage of time puts it into perspective.

In The Lost Seigneur, as well as in The Sound and the Fury, the story moves back and forth among characters, decades and circumstances, much the same as a descendant learns about ancestry through family stories. The narratives immerse the reader inside the different characters’ minds, using memories, sometimes flashbacks, observations, imagery and dreams. The result of these complex revelations is not only a contrapuntal-like portrait of a family history, but also subtle elucidation about religious, social, and gender intolerance. An interface of similar themes is presented in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, wherein the characters confront mortality and self-realization. Similar to Cunningham’s Laura Brown, who abandons her family when she can no longer conform, Loux’s Gotzone departs from France with Jean Pierre to find his son. These are both acts of self-liberation that become life centering. Magdalena’s realizations are the convergence point ultimately for the tragedies, choices, and romances that make up Jean Claude’s ancestry. Time and mortality ripple through Loux’s and Cunningham’s characters as they face and come to terms with the joy and heartbreak that time inflicts upon them, at which point the lost seigneur is found.

Religious intolerance underpins Jean Pierre’s ordeal. While he is imprisoned by the Dragonnades, Jean Pierre is told by his captor how an idea can be powerful. And dangerous. “Christianity itself is just an idea, and imagine if people got to thinking there was a truer faith, as the Cathars believed. Imagine the damage it could cause, if it were allowed to go unchecked.” As for gender intolerance, a young woman, Gotzone, learns her father plans to sell her into a marriage with a much older man and soon after witnesses a chicken’s final moments before it was slaughtered. Her father’s deal is made at a dinner at which that chicken is served and Gotzone that night dreams she is in the yard when “a cloud came over the sun,” and her father arrives “with his slaughtering knife, and he walked up to her and knelt by her side. Patting her head, he gently stroked her hair. His eyes were soft. They seemed to pity her. Too late she saw the knife start to move.” For Magdalena, her platonic marriage was self-imposed. As she explains to her mother, if “Lawrence and I were married, maybe some of the boys would leave me alone. They can be such a bother sometimes. They think they can tell me what to do, and I won’t have it!”

From one chapter to the next, Loux juggles multiple character perspectives during parallel chronologies. The storyline set earlier in France anchors what is happening in the present in Penn’s Woods, a place where in Jean Pierre’s opinion men of uncouth customs live, being “fur trappers and questionable characters.” The two time periods and places are different, and in neither place is the world in balance. The two chronologies conjoin toward the end of the novel when Jean Pierre sets out from France for America. And here also is where Jean Pierre’s actions start an ancestral understanding to be bestowed upon the characters of Loux’s first novel, Chateau Laux, who are the characters resident in Penn’s Woods. Soon, the calamitous events in France cross an ocean and are presented to Magdalena’s family, “Like a story already writ, that had the power to change lives.”

Loux’s focus on history in both of his novels delivers his message that to understand life today one must understand how life was lived in the past. The Lost Seigneur demonstrates the message brilliantly during the scene between Magdalena and Lawrence following her first encounter with her grandfather. She asks Lawrence the questions one asks when one is confronted with a traumatic exposure to the past: “Where have we gone wrong? What have we done to ourselves? Who have we become?” Similar questions are asked by Julien in The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears and by Alma in The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, two novels to which The Lost Seigneur can share a stage. Loux does not definitively answer these questions. Nor should he. As the story of The Lost Seigneur intimates, the answers will be different every time the questions are asked.

David Loux is an American short story writer who has published in Ploughshares, Manzanita, and other literary journals. He has ghostwritten several works, including a reminiscence of the Holocaust. His first novel was Chateaux Laux (2021). He lives in the Mt. Rose area of the eastern Sierra with his wife Lynn.

Mark Zvonkovic is an American writer who lives in the Hudson River Valley, New York. His book reviews and essays can be found in several online publications. He has written three novels, A Lion In The Grass (2018), The Narrows (2020), and Belinda (2022), and he is at work on a fourth novel. Before he started writing fiction, Mark practiced law for thirty-five years at several multinational law firms in Houston and New York. 

10 June 2026