Who would have bet on Napoleon Bonaparte in August, 1794, when he was in prison in Antibes for conspiring with the Robespierre brothers, resigned, if not to dying, at least to fleeing France forever? Who would have believed, shortly after the French Revolution, that an exiled brother of the deceased Louis XVI would return in triumph to be King of France one day? Who would have predicted that Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, serving a life sentence at the Fort of Ham, would someday be first president, then Emperor?of France? Or that Clemenceau, who was ousted from politics after the Panama canal scandal, would come to be known twenty years later as The Tiger and The Father of Victory ? How did Churchill, who was blamed for the 1915 disaster in the Dardanelles and demoted from his position as First Lord of the Admiralty, overcome such an ordeal to becomes one of the greatest heroes in British history? What were the chances that Camilla Parker Bowles would be Queen of England one day?

A remontada, or comeback, is the moment when you get back in the saddle, when the sublime surge comes to change everything and save the day!

From Agrippina the Younger to King Louis?XII and Richard the Lionheart, from Bonaparte to Louis?XVIII and Napoleon III, from Abd El Kader to Louis Pasteur, Clemenceau to Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and Camilla, the people described in this volume are like phoenixes and Monte Cristo!

After glory and time have gilded statues, history is there to helpfully remind us that the most famous, successful people are often survivors, not to say the products of miracules…