About this audiobook
An elderly duchess recalls her youth and the attentions of the Marquis d’Urfé. Flirtation, teasing and the wish to test another person's courage gradually lead her story beyond the familiar conventions of aristocratic life. An old castle and a promise of a meeting after three hundred years bring a disturbing possibility into what first appears to be a worldly romantic episode.
Alexey Konstantinovich Tolstoy builds the tale around the encounter between social ease and the fear of an unfamiliar world. Personal recollection conveys both what happened and how the narrator experienced it. Beneath the elegant manner of the telling, uncertainty grows about the boundary separating a joke, an inherited story and reality.
The story draws its tension from anticipation, an old promise and the consequences of curiosity. Its Gothic atmosphere will interest readers who enjoy unsettling memories and narratives in which familiar people and places gradually acquire a different significance.
