Jaime Pasquier

I write because I cannot separate the questions that haunt me from the forms I use to pursue them. The Virtuous Life grew out of a lifelong obsession with a deceptively simple problem: why do so many people who have achieved everything they were told to want still feel that something essential is missing? That question led me deep into Aristotle and the Stoics, into Buddhist thought and Confucian ethics, into the history of civilization's great builders and its recurring collapse — and what I found was not an answer so much as a framework, one that ancient thinkers had worked out with extraordinary precision and that our culture has quietly abandoned. The Scandal That Shook the Throne came from a different direction, from family memory and archival obsession, from the oral tradition that whispered across generations that a disgraced French duke did not die in 1847 but fled to Nicaragua and lived for thirty-five more years under a false name — and yet the deeper I went into that story, the more I realized it was asking the same questions as the philosophy book: Can a person become someone other than who they were at their worst? Is redemption possible when the crime is unforgivable? My father, Jaime Pasquier, was a scholar, diplomat, and professor who embodied the examined life — a man who took ideas seriously and demonstrated through decades of public service what it actually looks like to live in accordance with one's values — and in both books, I am in some sense trying to honor his example: to take the oldest questions seriously, resist easy answers, and insist that how we live is not a peripheral concern but the central one, the one on which everything else depends.