The Guest of Quesnay

Paris in the early twentieth century: a city of electric light and deep shadow, where fortunes are made and unmade on a single season's whim. George Ward has carved out a comfortable life as a portrait painter among the boulevards, his success secure until an old acquaintance disrupts his carefully ordered world. Larrabee Harman arrives in Paris trailing the wreckage of scandal and dissipated wealth, a man whose name once opened every door in America and now opens none. Ward recognizes something of his own vulnerabilities in this spectacular fall, and finds himself drawn deeper into Harman's orbit, alongside the enigmatic dancer Mariana, whose own ambitions and secrets bind the three together. Tarkington renders the Parisian art world with sharp, unsentimental precision: its cocktail glamour, its predatory patrons, its beautiful cruelties. This is a novel about the price of visibility, the way fame compounds both its triumphs and its destructions, and the particular loneliness of American strangers in a city that celebrates them only until the next novelty arrives.