'Gloria Victis!' a Romance

Paris, post-Lent, when society emerges from winter's gloom hungry for diversion and deception. The Truyn family occupies that precarious rung of the aristocracy where money has always been scarcer than pride. When the Baroness Melkweyser arrives with a proposal from the wealthy Count Capriani's ambitious son, she sets in motion a collision between love and calculation that has been generations in the making. Gabrielle Truyn finds herself caught between her heart's pull toward her cousin Oswald and the brutal arithmetic of social advancement. Schubin writes with sharp precision about the rituals of courtship, the unspoken commerce of marriage, and the way financial anxiety wearing silk gloves looks exactly like sentiment. This is a novel that understands how thoroughly money and feeling intertwine in the bloodless wars of Parisian society, where every waltz is a negotiation and every eligible daughter is a strategic asset.