Court of Honor

Fülszöveg

__A NOVEL BY
Maria Fagyas
Court of Honor is a dramatic, sophisticated love story, set in the very highest circles of Imperial Germany at the zenith of Kaiser Wilhelm II's reign and glory.
At the center of the novel is a beautiful, intelligent and impetuous young woman, Alexa de Rethy, born into a noble but impoverished Hungarian family, whose marriage precipitates a crisis that implicates some of the leading figures of the realm, threatens the Kaiser himself, brings disgrace on his beloved elite Gardes du Corps regiment and scandalizes an astonished Europe. Its glittering cast of characters, many of them carefully based on real people, includes: —Prince Philipp zu Eulenberg, the Kaiser's oldest, closest friend and most intimate adviser, whose career as a statesman is destroyed .
—Count Nicholas Karady, the dashing Austro-Hungarian military attache at the court, whose love for Alexa becomes a haunting, self-destructive obsession —General Kuno von Moltke, the Kaiser's... Tovább

Fülszöveg

__A NOVEL BY
Maria Fagyas
Court of Honor is a dramatic, sophisticated love story, set in the very highest circles of Imperial Germany at the zenith of Kaiser Wilhelm II's reign and glory.
At the center of the novel is a beautiful, intelligent and impetuous young woman, Alexa de Rethy, born into a noble but impoverished Hungarian family, whose marriage precipitates a crisis that implicates some of the leading figures of the realm, threatens the Kaiser himself, brings disgrace on his beloved elite Gardes du Corps regiment and scandalizes an astonished Europe. Its glittering cast of characters, many of them carefully based on real people, includes: —Prince Philipp zu Eulenberg, the Kaiser's oldest, closest friend and most intimate adviser, whose career as a statesman is destroyed .
—Count Nicholas Karady, the dashing Austro-Hungarian military attache at the court, whose love for Alexa becomes a haunting, self-destructive obsession —General Kuno von Moltke, the Kaiser's military strategist, who is forced to defend himself in a series of libel trials that is a German equivalent of the Oscar Wilde case . . . —Captain Hans Giinther von Godenhau-
(continued from front flap)
sen, Alexa's handsome, socially ambitious husband, whose coldness and indifference conceal a different, more sinister kind of passion than any she can imagine . . . —And Alexa herself, whose beauty, candor and innocence form the catalyst of a tragedy that engulfs and almost destroys her—for in the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II innocence is a dangerous flaw. Behind the glamorous uniforms, the extravagant luxury of the balls and parties, the stiff opulence of formal dinners and the strutting parades lies a world of brutal ambition, of sadistic cruelty, of regimentation and grandiose plans for conquest.
Married to Godenhausen, exiled from her family in the cold and hostile capital of an ambitious Prussia, Alexa is haunted by the memory of Beata, her twin sister, who died in a tragic fire shortly after marrying Nicholas Karady. Inevitably, fatally, she falls in love with Karady. And he with her, for his life has been destroyed by the death of his beloved Beata, and here is her twin, alive, identical, irresistible. Together, they take the dangerous step of becoming lovers, so wrapped up in themselves that they almost fail to notice that a much greater scandal is gradually forcing its way into their idyll, that Godenhausen, a favorite of the Kaiser, is being dragged into a court scandal of major dimensions, involving homosexual allegations, newspaper headlines and reckless blackmail. Vissza