A brilliant socialist agitator and a young woman of good family love each other, and both are too vain to give an inch — and it ends in a duel. Meredith took the story from life: Ferdinand Lassalle had died in a duel over Helene von Dönniges only sixteen years before the book appeared, and half of Europe knew the names. He called it a study rather than a novel, and the vanity is dissected on both sides. Fifty-six plates after painters of the period, from Achenbach's riders on the beach to Liebermann's Amsterdam, give the novel's world of vanity and public reckoning its visual weather.