This is the second in a series of 13 historical novels about the lives of a family of minor Huguenot nobles, the de Sioracs, in 16th and 17th century France. The series was written by French author Robert Merle over a period of 26 years, though I understand that only the first four books in the series have thus far been translated into English. The action picks up where the first book ended, with young Pierre de Siorac and his half brother Samson setting out on their journey of life, with Pierre enrolling as a medical student in Montpellier. While this is very well written, I thought this mostly lacked the narrative drive of the first novel, and had throughout much of it a more comic feel, with Pierre getting into a series of sexual entanglements with almost every lady he meets, and into scrapes such as disinterring a body from the graveyard to provide an extra corpse for dissection in anatomy lessons, while at the same time engaging in sexual relations with a self-proclaimed witch in the selfsame graveyard. All this said, the threat of bitter and bloody civil war between Catholic and Huguenot is never far away, with Pierre disgusted by the reprisals of his fellow Huguenots when they take power in Nimes, butchering Catholic priests, monks and ordinary citizens ("What kind of a new world is this, that begins with the massacre of people who, when all is said and done, have the same God that we do but worship Him in a different way?”). He pleads for toleration in the face of extremists on both sides of the religious divide: "how can we possibly argue for the freedom of conscience for ourselves, which the papists have denied us, if we refuse it to those who have ideas that differ from ours?” Parts of this novel also felt like a brain dump of information on medicinal herbs, or early modern age ideas of medicine and anatomy - interesting but distracted sometimes from the narrative. These criticisms apart, this was still a very rich and well written novel and I will certainly be reading the following novels. ( )

1563-1567 : quatre années de paix entre catholiques et protestants de France. Paix fragile, mais suffisante pour que Pierre de Siorac, héros de Fortune de France, et son frère Samson soient envoyés par leur père étudier la médecine à Montpellier.Voici nos deux frères huguenots sur les grands chemins du royaume, puis parmi les docteurs et apothicaires de l'Ecole de Médecine fameuse dans toute l'Europe. Dissections nocturnes, sorcellerie, amours de grandes dames ou de ribaudes, fréquentation des athées et des sodomites... Et puis de nouveau la guerre civile, les massacres, la fuite...Roman historique, roman picaresque, En nos vertes années nous fait traverser, au rythme de multiples aventures, une époque où la mort et l'horreur quotidiennes n'empêchent ni la soif de savoir ni cette « gaieté d'esprit » chère à Rabelais, où se marque l'immense vitalité de la Renaissance.