Paris, 1853. Germana de Pressanges is nineteen years old and condemned. Tuberculosis has marked her for an early grave, and her aristocratic parents see only one remaining use for their fading daughter: she will marry Count Don Diego and give his illegitimate son a legitimate name. The price is generous. The arrangement is mercenary. And Germana, too weak to resist and too proud to weep, finds herself embarking on a grotesque honeymoon across Italy toward Corfu, accompanied by the husband who despises her, the mother-in-law who tolerates her, and the child who will inherit everything she was never meant to keep. But waiting in the wings is Madame Chermidy, the Count's discarded mistress and the boy's true mother, who has no intention of sharing her son's future with a dying woman. What follows is a chilling portrait of patience exhausted and greed sharpened by proximity to death. Edmond About, writing at the height of Second Empire France, dissects the brutal arithmetic of a society that monetizes a woman's final breaths.
X-Ray
