A holiday encounter with the elegant, melancholy (and married) Baroness von St Arnaud turns to obsession for a young engineer in this 19th-century realist novel.
“A master of characterization and delicate plotting.” —New Yorker
On holiday at a fashionable German spa, young civil engineer Herr von Gordon meets Colonel von St Arnaud and his younger wife, the beautiful Cécile. He is drawn to this elegant and melancholy woman, who seems to hold herself at a distance from her husband. As von Gordon and the married pair tour local attractions and enjoy the scenery of the Harz Mountains, he finds himself ever more fascinated by Cécile – and by the mystery surrounding her past. Why is she so much younger than her husband? Why is he simultaneously so solicitous and so cold towards her? Why do the Colonel’s former colleagues avoid him? Why is Cécile simultaneously so elegant and so ignorant?
As Gordon and Cécile grow closer, her husband’s jealousy, the gossip of polite society, and the secrets of the past converge. When they meet again in Berlin society, the attraction between the two young people will have tragic consequences for all. History repeats itself, culminating a duel when the truth of Cécile’s past finally comes to light.
A challenge to societal conventions, a portrait of a complex woman and a biting send-up of early tourist culture, Fontane’s novel is an elegant, ironic and moving classic of 19th-century realist fiction.
