It puts you in a ballroom at Versailles and then pulls the floor out. Isabelle Laustin is fifteen, freshly presented to the aristocracy, and within a handful of episodes the army has collapsed at Sedan and her family's mansion is something she's walking away from. That whiplash is the whole point: this is a romance where the love story has to survive a Prussian siege, and thirteen episodes means nothing gets padded, the war arrives fast and stays. Anime almost never touches 1870, and watching a 1979 production commit to the Franco-Prussian collapse with a noble girl who chooses to fight rather than flee still lands harder than it has any right to. If you came up on Rose of Versailles and wanted the sequel-in-spirit nobody talks about, this is the one gathering dust. Watch the ball scene, then remember it while Paris starves.

Fifteen-year-old Isabelle Laustin, a young noblewoman in 19th-century France, makes her formal entry into aristocratic society at a ball in Versailles. Soon afterward, the French army is defeated at Sedan, and Isabelle and her parents, Leon and Marie, must abandon their mansion and take shelter in Paris. There the family joins the struggle against the Prussians. When the capital comes under siege, Isabelle disguises herself as a boy, slips away to London and takes on work as a secret agent. Her friends Jean and his sister Marie and her suitor, Captain Victor, share her story in this period drama with romance woven through a nation at war.