Simon, the Jester

Summary

A marble-cheeked plutocrat, Simon De Gex, is handed a death warrant disguised as a medical bulletin—six months of breath left in his gilded lungs. Instead of folding like parchment, he uncorks a delirious last waltz: jilting porcelain-fiancée Eleanor Faversham, bankrolling chaos, and colluding with a pocket-sized Mephistopheles to assassinate a circus runaway in gaslit Paris. Bloodied but not bowed, he collapses under a mortal seizure; Lola, the lion-tamer’s smoky-eyed widow, becomes his Florence in sequins. When a scalpel snatches him back from the cliff, he scours Europe for the woman who taught him that survival can be more savage than dying. Their reunion ignites a final opera of guilt: the dwarf returns, vengeance misfires, acid obliterates Lola’s sight, and Simon—once a jesting Midas—learns that love’s currency is paid in darkness. A second blade of science returns her vision; only then does the ringmaster’s bride consent to marry the man who financed her ruin and her resurrection.

Synopsis

Learning he has six months to live, the wealthy Simon De Gex decides to tell no one of his impending death and to spend his fortune madly. He breaks off his engagement to Eleanor Faversham, then is approached in a park by a dwarf and enlisted in a plot to kill the deserting husband of the beautiful Lola, a cat trainer at the London Hippodrome. The murder plans are carried out in Paris; the dwarf stabs Lola's husband and Simon departs, only to be overcome by his sickness. Selflessly Lola nurses him back to health, but, ridiculed as low-class by Eleanor and Dale, Simon's secretary, she returns to the theater. Cured by a daring operation, Simon sets out to find Lola. His search is rewarded but coincides with the reappearance of the demented dwarf. In a fury of rejection, the dwarf accidentally blinds his beloved. Simon devotes himself to Lola, but she resists his proposals until a second miraculous operation restores her eyesight and frees her to marry in good conscience.