From the dead princess, Kenizé Mourad

" This is the story of my mother, Princess Selma, born in a palace in Istanbul... "

It could be the beginning of a fairy tale; it is an authentic story, which begins in 1918 at the court of the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
Selma is seven years old when she sees this Empire, which had made Europe tremble, crumble. Condemned to exile, the imperial family settles in Lebanon. Selma, who has lost both her country and her father, will be "the princess with darned stockings" there. It is in Beirut that she will grow up and meet her first love, a young Druze leader; a love soon broken. Selma then agrees to marry an Indian rajah she has never seen. In India, she will experience the splendor of the maharajahs, the last days of the British Empire, and the struggle for independence led by Gandhi.
But there, as in Lebanon, she remains "the stranger." Rejected by this people she had grown to love, she will flee to Paris. There she will finally find true love. War will separate them, and she will die in destitution, at twenty-nine years old, after giving birth to a daughter: the author of this account.
For the first time, the end of the Ottoman Empire is told to us from within the palaces, while we discover Lebanon under the French mandate through the great families of Beirut, and feudal India through the eyes of its peasants and princes. It is rare for a book to combine heart and History so intimately.

"Later, much later," writes Kenizé Mourad, "I wanted to understand who my mother was. Interviewing those who had known her, consulting history books, newspapers of the time, and the scattered archives of the family, I tried to reconstruct the various settings of her existence, now irremediably disrupted, and to relive what she had lived. Finally, to get even closer to her, to find her again, I trusted my intuition and my imagination."
Such is this book. Such is the story of Princess Selma, the most romantic of true stories.