Ouida in short form: officers, gambling debts, a woman who is cleverer than the men admiring her, and the Continental spa where reputations are lost. Maria Louise Ramé took her pen name from a child's mispronunciation of Louisa, kept a suite at the Langham, wrote some forty novels, and died in poverty in Italy having given most of it to stray dogs. The flamboyance is the point, and she is funnier than her reputation. Fifty-nine plates of officers, society women and leisure in full sunlight, from Hokusai to Tissot, match the glitter and the debts of Ouida's world.
