Summary
Montmartre’s ochre dusk bleeds across Ned Templeton’s garret, where unpaid rent and hunger gnaw louder than artistic ambition; his wife Joan, once the trembling muse of his canvases, trades her body for crusts and candle stubs, sealing a carnal pact with the city’s nocturnal benefactors. Years later, Manhattan’s electric avenues swallow the couple as Ned’s paintings—now gilded by sudden acclaim—hang in gilded salons; yet the past, corseted in silk and cigar smoke, arrives in the person of James Cartwright, a patron whose purse once purchased Joan’s flesh and whose daughter Helen now covets Ned’s name. Cartwright’s whispered ultimatum—divorce Joan or watch her Parisian shame splashed across tabloid ink—sparks a reckoning: Ned, eavesdropping from a mahogany corridor, confronts the crucible of his own success and the crucified woman who paid for it in skin and secrecy.
Synopsis
Struggling artist Ned Templeton and his wife Joan are leading a poverty-stricken life in Paris. Threatened by starvation and eviction, Joan is forced to become a prostitute. After some time, Ned becomes successful, and he and Joan move to New York. There he meets Helen, daughter of wealthy art patron James Cartwright. Cartwright was the man who "bought" Joan in Paris, and when he learns that his daughter's happiness depends upon Ned's divorce, he threatens to expose Joan. Ned overhears his threat and realizes his love for Joan and the sacrifice that she has made for him.
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