Four portraits of invented or half-invented lives set in the European past: the young Watteau seen through the journal of a girl in Valenciennes; Denys, a strange Dionysian figure in medieval Auxerre; Sebastian van Storck, a cold young Dutch philosopher; and Duke Carl of Rosenmold, a German princeling hungry for the Enlightenment. Each blends art criticism, history and quiet tragedy.
Pater’s prose at its most refined, for readers of aesthetic fiction and the art of the 1880s. Download the free EPUB.