This swashbuckling soap opera successfully unites elements of feeling with explosive action. Just prior to the French Revolution, Andre Louis, a polymath masquerading as a lawyer, gets into trouble after his friend confronts a member of the nobility who'd threatened to stifle the movement he'd eloquently defended. The murder of his friend ignites in Andre a quenchless thirst for revenge, sending him off into several different cliques in which he uses a number of alternate identities to conceal himself after getting in trouble with the law. First, he poses as a revolutionary orator, then as an actor in a theater group, and then as a fencing instructor (clearly with an ulterior motive). You never quite know who he'll transform into at the next turn of the plot. Even at the end we see the completeness of his ever-shifting persona, as several shocking revelations are thrown at him.
I found this book to be shamefully underrated among the classics. How had I not heard of it until I was 32? Who knows. Perhaps it was released at the wrong time; a book set during the French Revolution being published in 1924 probably didn't muster the amount of interest it would have had pre-modernism. Even the style of writing is so 19th century that I found myself having to re-check the year of publication just to make sure. Maybe it was so derivative of stories like The Count of Monte Cristo that it couldn't sustain any of the originality that the classics are in demand of having, though in spite of that I still found it a distinct work that has a voice of its own.
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