"As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vine-leaves under the blue sky of southern Italy, it comes to me with a certain quality of astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr. Cavor was, after all, the outcome of the purest accident. It might have been any one. I fell into these things at a time when I thought myself removed from the slightest possibility of disturbing experiences. I had gone to Lympne because I...

'It was the best of times, it was the the worst of times,' we are told at the outset, but it is mostly brutality on display in this richly-woven and moving tale, set against the bloody and fearsome events of the French Revolution. Two men, one a French aristocrat, one a dissipated English barrister, both love the same woman. Their rivalry takes them through cobblestone alleys thick with filth and violence, into the company of the revolution's most...

La Cousine Bette is an 1846 novel by French author Honore de Balzac. Set in mid-19th-century Paris, it tells the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who plots the destruction of her extended family. Bette works with Valerie Marneffe, an unhappily married young lady, to seduce and torment a series of me