A small European kingdom, a dying king, a duchess who wants the throne for her line, an Austrian loan falling due, and an American who happens to be in the capital. MacGrath was a Syracuse newspaperman who became one of the best-paid novelists of his day and among the first to write seriously for the screen; this 1901 romance is briskly cynical about how kingdoms are actually disposed of — by bankers. Fifty-seven plates of café tables, garden corners and exiled royalty by painters including Edvard Munch and Eugène Lami give this tale of a kingdom traded over coffee its proper faces.
