A Rogue's Tragedy
1906
In an isolated village perched among the eighteenth-century Alps, two young dreamers collide with a world that demands they choose between love and survival. Yolande, daughter of a penniless nobleman, and Louis-Marie, heir to a respectable name, discover in each other something their circumstances insist they cannot have: an authentic connection that feels like divine revelation. But Yolande's father, desperate to secure her future, has already bargained her hand to the wealthy and morally suspect Count di Rocco. What unfolds is a romance soaked in philosophical yearning, where love is presented not as mere emotion but as the fundamental truth beneath reality itself, the dreaming god at the heart of existence. Capes writes with a mystic's conviction and a tragedian's eye for doomed beauty, crafting a novel where the Alpine landscape becomes almost a character, its glaciers and pine forests echoing the frozen impossibility of true love in a world governed by wealth and status. The prose aspires to poetry, interrogating whether we owe our lives to flesh or to some higher, more enduring dream.
