Summary
In a velvet-draped salon where candlelight licks at the edges of masks, the scholar Leo Fielding—tongue fluent in dead alphabets—follows his reckless sibling into a lottery of blood; black ballots bloom like nightshade seeds, one bearing the prince’s name. A truncheon-swinging raid scatters the conspirators, yet Leo, iron-bound by fraternal guilt, claims the heresy as his own, exiling himself across the Atlantic and abandoning infant Floria to the mercies of a brother already half-devoured by his wife’s avarice. Dulcine, coveting the child’s patrimony, bribes Count DeGrasse—the anarchist chieftain turned ringmaster of pandemonium—to shepherd Floria westward and drown her secrets in mid-ocean. News of the girl’s fabricated watery grave hollows Leo into a husk; he re-emerges years later beneath striped canvas, his voice a cracked trumpet hawking sawdust and wonder, while overhead a winged acrobat—his own daughter, though neither suspects—spins on the trapeze like Icarus in sequins. DeGrasse, still pulling marionette strings, keeps Floria tethered by blackmail; Lemuel Salter, the circus’s reptilian manager, slithers after her with diamond-ringed claws. Into this sawdust inferno strides Wilfred Wells, millionaire masquerading as a meek stenographer, to audit the ledgers and instead audits his own heart. Rebuffed, Salter retaliates with vitriol on the net; fate intervenes so that the ringmaster, not the flyer, plunges through the acid-eaten mesh. With his last breath DeGrasse unseals the genealogical scroll; father and daughter recognize the mirrored ache in their irises. Curtain falls on reconciliation and marriage, the big top folding like a cathedral of provisional grace.
Synopsis
Leo Fielding, a professor of languages, reluctantly goes with his younger brother Henri to an anarchists' meeting. In black robes and masks, members draw ballots to choose someone to assassinate the prince. When the police raid, Leo says that he induced Henri to attend. Banished, Leo goes to America, sadly leaving his baby Floria with Henri. Five years later, Henri's wife Dulcine, wanting Floria's inheritance, urges Henri to send their niece to Leo with Count DeGrasse, the anarchist leader, whom she has secretly paid to kill the girl en route. After learning of Floria's supposed drowning, Leo loses interest in life. Years later he becomes a circus barker and makes friends with the aerialist, in reality his daughter Floria, whom DeGrasse, the ringmaster, has forced to support him. After Floria refuses to marry manager Lemuel Salter, owner Wilfred Wells, masquerading as a stenographer to investigate graft, falls in love with her and thrashes Salter. In revenge, Salter pours acid on the safety net, but DeGrasse performs before Floria and is killed. Before dying, DeGrasse reveals Floria's identity. Now reconciled with Leo, Floria marries Wilfred.
