A boy in the France of the religious wars grows up through Ronsard, Montaigne and the massacre — the education of a mind, arranged as a sequence of encounters. Pater's conclusion to The Renaissance, that we should burn with a hard gemlike flame, became the motto of the aesthetes and frightened him so much he withdrew it; he left this novel unfinished at his death, and the Montaigne chapter is the best prose he ever wrote. Fifty-seven plates, from Antoine Caron to Edvard Munch, trace the boyhood, portraiture and French courtly world that Pater's unfinished romance inhabits.
