Germana

It is January 1, 1853. In a grand Paris hotel, servants celebrate with wine and laughter, their pockets full of year-end bonuses. Into this scene of bourgeois contentment walks a woman in shabby elegance, the Duchess of La Tour de Embleuse, come to collect her husband's leftover credit. The Duke's fortune has evaporated, and with it, the world that defined his family. Their daughter Germana is dying, her fragile body consumptive, her future already written in the sanatoriums and silence of the aristocratic poor. As the family grapples with their fall from grace, one solution remains: a marriage of convenience that might restore their fortunes. But Germana must decide whether to sacrifice what little life remains for the name her family carries. Written in 1828, About's novel arrives as social prophecy, a portrait of a class that cannot imagine its own irrelevance, and a young woman who must weigh her dignity against her duty.