Paris, September. Felix Dane, a restless English sculptor and self-declared vagabond, has barely settled back into his eyrie above the Luxembourg Gardens when his formidable step-sister Marion arrives with an outrageous request: hide a young girl, known only as Fifine, from a father said to mean her harm, and tell no one. Is she really a noblewoman in mortal danger, or is the whole affair some elaborate fantasy? Amused, and not remotely convinced, Felix gives his word anyway.
What follows is as witty as it is tender. Behind a locked door, the clever, self-mocking artist and his calm, sharp-tongued guest fall into an improbable domestic life of improvised dinners, dresses designed on a living model, cigarettes and ferocious arguments about art. Fifine scorns his modern experiments, champions the old masters and demolishes his most glittering theories, until the man who prides himself on never being surprised is surprised every single day. Meanwhile, small mysteries gather at the edges of their hidden world, and neither of them will quite name the secrets they keep.
Told in the first person, in retrospect and with a trace of longing, this 1914 novel by Bernard Capes (1854-1918) is part romance, part mystery, part comedy of manners. It brings a painter’s eye to Bohemian Paris and asks what really divides the classes, what makes beauty, and how affection quietly takes root between two people who insist they are merely comrades.