Summary
In the gaslit hush of post-war Montmartre, a repressed American fossil-hunter arrives armed with nothing but a measuring caliper and a puritan aunt’s icy commission: exhume the morals of Liane Valois, a flapper grand-daughter whose reputation sparkles like absinthe spilled on cobblestones. What Basil Hammond expects is a chalky skeleton of propriety; what he confronts is a living, perfumed cataclysm—Lillian Lawrence’s Liane—who swishes into salons wearing scandal as if it were a silk kimono painted by Foujita. She teases, pouts, pirouettes, and deliberately mispronounces his surname, turning “Hammond” into a slow striptease of syllables. Beneath the champagne froth, though, lies a girl shackled to Count Oudoff, a powdered panther of the old régime whose moustache wax could probably hold up the Eiffel Tower. Basil’s disdain mutates into helpless fascination; he catalogues her vertebrae of laughter the way he would a diplodocus, only to discover his own heart has slipped between the strata. The duel at dawn—rapiers, not revolvers, because the Count insists on antique theatre—becomes a danse macabre staged on a Pont Neuf still misty from Rimbaud’s breath. Liane’s crimson cloak whips across the blade, blood falls like a comma, and Paris itself seems to inhale. Believing he has lost her, Basil boards the Île-de-France in a fog of Gallic despair, only to find her in a deck-chair, passport in one hand, trousseau in the other, ready to transplant the scandal to Manhattan.
Synopsis
Without social or romantic interests, young Basil Hammond goes to Paris to study paleontology and to bring back a report to his guardian on the manners and moral character of her granddaughter, Liane. At first he is disgusted by her attempts to vamp him, but eventually he falls in love with her. Basil discovers that Liane is engaged to Count Oudoff, and when the Count insults him at a party, a duel is arranged. Liane intervenes to save Basil, and in despair he returns to America; on the steamer he finds Liane, and she promises to marry him.
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