Summary
A Modernist Icarus tale unfolds as architect John Chance—part Promethean craftsman, part reluctant courtier—descends upon a Parisian carnival whose masked chaos mirrors the moral masquerade he will soon inhabit. Amid fire-eaters and harlequinades he extricates Cynthia Grey, an American sylph with eyes like fresh parchment, from a swarm of torch-bearing revelers; their brief pas de deux beside the Seine’s oil-black water feels less like rescue than premonition. Months later, aboard an ocean liner vibrating with turbine ambition, Cynthia succumbs to the gravitational charisma of Prophet Stein—polygamist, utopian huckster, collector of loveliness—who sees in her face the perfect advertisement for his theocratic real-estate Ponzi scheme. Stein commissions Chance to erect a phosphorescent metropolis in the desert, a mirage of ziggurat terraces and chromium spires whose blueprints promise salvation but whose ledgers bleed congregants dry. Under the slogan “Beauty Through Toil,” every hammer swing is credited to anonymous comrades, erasing authorship so that Stein’s ego may bloom like nightshade. Chance, love-struck and ethically porous, complies; yet when Stein’s predatory hunger turns to Cynthia, the architect weaponizes ink and newsprint, detonating a scandal that reduces the Dream City to cinders. In the final conflagration, Stein—bags of embezzled bullion in either fist—dies beneath a falling timber halo, while Chance and Cynthia escape into the ash-flecked dawn, their survival less triumph than tacit confession that every utopia begins in seduction and ends in arson.
Synopsis
Architect John Chance, before building a "Dream City" for a religious cult leader, Prophet Stein, visits Paris and rescues an American girl, Cynthia Grey, from riotous masqueraders at a carnival. After they part, Cynthia returns home. Meeting Stein aboard a ship, and having an idealistic nature, she becomes a follower of Stein, who thinks her beauty will attract others. Chance builds the city, agreeing to say it was made by the "comrades" so that Stein's motto, "Beauty Through Toil," will seem to be true. Cynthia and Chance fall in love and when Stein, a married man, attempts to seduce Cynthia, Chance tells the newspapers, which expose Stein and his financially fraudulent practices. The "comrades" burn the "Dream City" and Chance saves Cynthia, while Stein, attempting to leave with his ill-gotten money, dies when a burning beam falls on his head.
