A Polish count of romantic manner courts a French heiress, and a shabby man from Vienna turns up who knows what the count was called before. Cherbuliez was a Genevan who took French citizenship at fifty and was in the Académie six years later; his subject was the cosmopolitan adventurer, and this 1877 novel handles the impostor with more sympathy than the people exposing him. Sixty plates of society portraiture by Manet, Degas and their contemporaries, from 1850 to 1910, give faces to the world of masquerade and false names this novel inhabits.
