The Dollar Tree chain of stores in the U.S. and Canada brings in remaindered books on occasion which they sell (like nearly everything they carry) for a dollar. One I found there a couple of weeks ago might be of interest to folks on the site.

Title is Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright and a Spy Saved the American Revolution, by Joel Richard Paul (2009, Riverside/Penguin).

It's what amounts to a triple biography of American Silas Deane, French author Caron de Beaumarchais (Barber of Seville, Marriage of Figaro -- the successful plays upon which Rossini and Mozart based the operas), and the Chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont, who had relatively little to do with the whole thing but was too good a subject to pass up.

(The author describes d'Eon as a "catalyst", which is true enough, as far as it goes.)

I'm assuming most of our readers know who d'Eon was: the 18th-century French spy, soldier, diplomat and finally, female celebrity whose physical sex remained an open question until death.

It covers the subjects' lives in full, but centers on the period beginning in early 1776, when Deane came to France, ostensibly as a merchant but charged with the task of getting France, under Louis XVI, to secretly provide military aid to the (soon to be former) colonies, in violation of France's treaty with England that had ended the Seven Years' War (aka the French and Indian War, in America) in 1762. (D'Eon had been one of the negotiators.) Later, after the colonies had declared their independence, Deane was joined by Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee.

D'Eon -- this was when he was identifying as male and working in England as a French diplomat -- did favor French aid to the former colonies, as a way of keeping the Brits preoccupied with a land war on another continent.

But the main reason he figures here is that Beaumarchais -- who was fanatical enough about the whole idea to become an arms trader and use secretly-provided French government funds to acquire the needed war materiel -- spent much of the year in negotiations with D'Eon over some embarrassing old correspondence from the king's predecessor that indicated that Louis XV had intended to break the peace treaty and invade England almost as soon as it had been signed. Louis XVI wanted it returned and destroyed.

Author Paul asserts that d'Eon's adopting a female identity (in addition to returning to France) was a condition of the negotiated agreement. The theory, apparently, was that anything d'Eon divulged after such a change would lack credibility.

Anyway, without the French weapons and ammunition, the Continental Army wouldn't have been able to defeat and capture Burgoyne at Saratoga in 1777 -- a major turning point in the war, both from the standpoint of effectively ending the war in the North and in getting official recognition from France and other European nations.

Lots more to the story, of course, including many complications along the way. (It took a number of tries to get the French goods out to sea, including one incident when Beaumarchais blew his cover by taking over as director of a local production of "Barber of Seville" to public acclaim in the seaport town where the ship was intended to secretly embark.)

And then there's the villains of the piece, co-negotiator Lee and Deane's secretary, friend and (probably) eventual murderer, British spy Edward Bancroft. (FWIW, the murder isn't a spoiler; it's in the first couple of pages of the book. But we haven't met any of our cast yet at that point.) About the only thing that bothered me was it seemed that Lee and Bancroft couldn't have been depicted any more dastardly if some hack author had made them up.

I found it a really good, even exciting, read, one of those "stranger than fiction" tales. (And the price was right. If Dollar Tree's out of them or is inconvenient, remainder book houses EdwardRHamilton.com and DaedalusBooks.com also have it, as do Amazon and its subvendors, in the $4-6 range.)

Eric