This story has everything: pre-revolutionary France, a murder mystery, sword fights, zombies, battle-through-poetry-readings. It’s been a long while since I’ve been this impressed with an anime. The art is breathtaking, they have a first class (Japanese) voice acting cast, and it’s historical. I love historical, behind-the-scenes stories. You know, the ones that tell what REALLY happened, which usually involves possessed flying evil skulls somewhere in them.

The plot takes place during Louis the XV’s reign of France. He’s the king before the king that had to deal with all those revolution shenanigans (Louis VXI) for you non-history buffs out there. The story explains what “really happened” with one of France’s real life spies, Chevalier D'Eon.  Chevalier`s gender is still a mystery due to the fact that he/she dressed both as a woman and a man during missions and claimed to be really one or the other at different points in their life. In the anime, D'Eon discovers his sister’s body floating down the Seine one day. The only clue to why she was killed is the word “Psalms” scrawled across the coffin she was found in. D'Eon decides to join the King’s Guard to find out what happened to his sister, Lia, and avenge her. Only zombie-ish creatures start popping out of the woodwork and “Poets” who can use magic by manipulating “Psalms” start in with the court intrigues and D'Eon is thrust into a world he wasn’t fully prepared to handle. Good thing his sister’s soul can possess him every now and then to help him solve the mystery of who killed her, huh?

If you are any kind of French history buff, you’ll be totally in love with this. The story is filled with real life characters and it’s wonderfully fun to see how they fit historical figures into the total fantastical plot. All you Russian and English history buffs won`t be left out in the cold, either. The detail to costuming and background is amazing.  The intrigue and plot twists are also lovely, lovely things. Although I am usually quite good at guessing where a story is heading, even I was left stunned by the revelations at the end of the story.

Although I’ve heard complaints from some that the plot is too slow and from others that it moved too fast, I felt it was just right. You do have to pay attention to it though or you miss things, especially towards the end. It’s not something you can watch when half your mind is distracted by something else. Also the budget starts to wear thin towards the end of the show, so while the costumes and sets are still lovely, lip synching and facial details go down. However, they do raise the animation quality back up for the last episodes though! And for real hard-core history buffs out there, you might have to shelf a small part of your continuity awareness. The story does compress about seven years of history into a few months time span, but it’s a good story so hopefully you can forgive it! It really is a stunning tale that leaves you feeling sad that the adventure is over when it draws to a close.