Le roman d'un jeune homme pauvre (Play)

Honor de artista by Octave Feuillet

Historia de una parisiense by Octave Feuillet

by MAXIME DU CAMP, of the French Academy OCTAVE FEUILLET OCTAVE FEUILLET'S works abound with rare qualities, forming a harmonious ensemble; they also exhibit great observation and knowledge of humanity, and through all of them runs an incomparable and distinctive charm. He will always be considered the leader of the idealistic school in the nineteenth century. It is now fifteen years since his death, and the judgment of posterity is that he had a great imagination, linked to great analytical power and insight; that his style is neat, pure, and fine, and at the same time brilliant and concise. He unites suppleness with force, he combines grace with vigor. Octave Feuillet was born at Saint-Lo (Manche), August 11, 1821, his father occupying the post of Secretary-General of the Prefecture de la Manche. Pupil at the Lycee Louis le Grand, he received many prizes, and was entered for the law. But he became early attracted to literature, and like many of the writers at that period attached himself to the "romantic school." He collaborated with Alexander Dumas pere and with Paul Bocage. It can not now be ascertained what share Feuillet may have had in any of the countless tales of the elder Dumas. Under his own name he published the novels 'Onesta' and 'Alix', in 1846, his first romances. He then commenced writing for the stage. We mention 'Echec et Mat' (Odeon, 1846); 'Palma, ou la Nuit du Vendredi-Saint' (Porte St. Martin, 1847); 'La Vieillesse de Richelieu' (Theatre Francais, 1848); 'York' (Palais Royal, 1852). Some of them are written in collaboration with Paul Bocage. They are dramas of the Dumas type, conventional, not without cleverness, but making no lasting mark.

by MAXIME DU CAMP, of the French Academy OCTAVE FEUILLET OCTAVE FEUILLET'S works abound with rare qualities, forming a harmonious ensemble; they also exhibit great observation and knowledge of humanity, and through all of them runs an incomparable and distinctive charm. He will always be considered the leader of the idealistic school in the nineteenth century. It is now fifteen years since his death, and the judgment of posterity is that he had a great imagination, linked to great analytical power and insight; that his style is neat, pure, and fine, and at the same time brilliant and concise. He unites suppleness with force, he combines grace with vigor. Octave Feuillet was born at Saint-Lo (Manche), August 11, 1821, his father occupying the post of Secretary-General of the Prefecture de la Manche. Pupil at the Lycee Louis le Grand, he received many prizes, and was entered for the law. But he became early attracted to literature, and like many of the writers at that period attached himself to the "romantic school." He collaborated with Alexander Dumas pere and with Paul Bocage. It can not now be ascertained what share Feuillet may have had in any of the countless tales of the elder Dumas. Under his own name he published the novels 'Onesta' and 'Alix', in 1846, his first romances. He then commenced writing for the stage. We mention 'Echec et Mat' (Odeon, 1846); 'Palma, ou la Nuit du Vendredi-Saint' (Porte St. Martin, 1847); 'La Vieillesse de Richelieu' (Theatre Francais, 1848); 'York' (Palais Royal, 1852). Some of them are written in collaboration with Paul Bocage. They are dramas of the Dumas type, conventional, not without cleverness, but making no lasting mark.

by MAXIME DU CAMP, of the French Academy OCTAVE FEUILLET OCTAVE FEUILLET'S works abound with rare qualities, forming a harmonious ensemble; they also exhibit great observation and knowledge of humanity, and through all of them runs an incomparable and distinctive charm. He will always be considered the leader of the idealistic school in the nineteenth century. It is now fifteen years since his death, and the judgment of posterity is that he had a great imagination, linked to great analytical power and insight; that his style is neat, pure, and fine, and at the same time brilliant and concise. He unites suppleness with force, he combines grace with vigor. Octave Feuillet was born at Saint-Lo (Manche), August 11, 1821, his father occupying the post of Secretary-General of the Prefecture de la Manche. Pupil at the Lycee Louis le Grand, he received many prizes, and was entered for the law. But he became early attracted to literature, and like many of the writers at that period attached himself to the "romantic school." He collaborated with Alexander Dumas pere and with Paul Bocage. It can not now be ascertained what share Feuillet may have had in any of the countless tales of the elder Dumas. Under his own name he published the novels 'Onesta' and 'Alix', in 1846, his first romances. He then commenced writing for the stage. We mention 'Echec et Mat' (Odeon, 1846); 'Palma, ou la Nuit du Vendredi-Saint' (Porte St. Martin, 1847); 'La Vieillesse de Richelieu' (Theatre Francais, 1848); 'York' (Palais Royal, 1852). Some of them are written in collaboration with Paul Bocage. They are dramas of the Dumas type, conventional, not without cleverness, but making no lasting mark.

I lay paralyzed on stiff white sheets, a prisoner in my own skin, listening to the rain lash against the window like nails on a coffin. My father, Elmore Franco, didn't even look at my face as he checked his clipboard. He just listened to the steady, monotonous beep of the heart monitor-the only thing proving I was still alive. Without a hint of remorse, he pulled a pen from his pocket and signed the Do Not Resuscitate order. My stepmother, Ophelia, stepped out from behind him, wearing my favorite pearl necklace and smelling of cloying perfume. She leaned close to my ear to whisper the truth that turned my blood to ice. "It was the tea, darling. Just like your mother. A slow, tasteless poison." She chuckled as she revealed that my fiancé, Bryce, had a two-year-old son with my sister, Daniela. My inheritance had been funding their secret life for years, and now that the money was secure, I was an inconvenience they were finally scrubbing away. As my father yanked the power cord from the wall, the beeping died, and the darkness swallowed me whole. I was being murdered by my own flesh and blood, used as a bank account until I was no longer needed. I died in that sterile room, drowning in the realization that every person I ever loved was a monster who had been waiting for me to take my last breath. Then, I gasped. I woke up in a luxury hotel suite surrounded by silk sheets, five years in the past-the very morning of my wedding. Next to me lay Basile Delgado, the "Wolf of Wall Street" and my family's most dangerous enemy. In my first life, I ran from this room in a panic and lost everything. This time, I looked at the man who would eventually destroy my father's empire and decided to join him. "I'm not leaving, Basile. Marry me. Right now. Today."

I woke up in a blindingly white hotel penthouse with a throbbing headache and the taste of betrayal in my mouth. The last thing I remembered was my stepsister, Cathie, handing me a flute of champagne at the charity gala with a smile that didn't reach her eyes. Now, a tall, dangerously handsome man walked out of the bathroom with a towel around his hips. On the nightstand sat a stack of hundred-dollar bills. My stepmother had finally done it—she drugged me and staged a scandal with a hired escort to destroy my reputation and my future. "Aisha! Is it true you spent the night with a gigolo?" The shouts of a dozen reporters echoed through the heavy oak door as camera flashes exploded through the peephole. My phone lit up with messages showing my bank accounts were already frozen. My father was invoking the 'morality clause' in my mother’s trust fund, and my fiancé had already released a statement dumping me to marry my stepsister instead. I was trapped, penniless, and being hunted by the press for a scandal I hadn't even participated in. My own family had sold me out for a payday, and the man standing in front of me was the only witness who could prove I was innocent—or finish me off for good. I didn't have time to cry. According to the fine print of the trust, I had thirty days to prove my "rehabilitation" through a legal marriage or I would lose everything. I tracked the man down to a coffee shop the next morning, watching him take a thick envelope of cash from a wealthy older woman. I sat across from him and slid a napkin with a $50,000 figure written on it. "I need a husband. Legal, paper-signed, and convincing." He looked at the number, then at me, a slow, crooked smile spreading across his face. I thought I was hiring a desperate gigolo to save my inheritance. I had no idea I was actually proposing to Dominic Fields, the reclusive billionaire shark who was currently planning a hostile takeover of my father’s entire empire.

I was four months pregnant, weighing over two hundred pounds, and my heart was failing from experimental treatments forced on me as a child. My doctor looked at me with clinical detachment and told me I was in a death sentence: if I kept the baby, I would die, and if I tried to remove it, I would die. Desperate for a lifeline, I called my father, Francis Acosta, to tell him I was sick and pregnant. I expected a father's love, but all I got was a cold, sharp blade of a voice. "Then do it quietly," he said. "Don't embarrass Candi. Her debutante ball is coming up." He didn't just reject me; he erased me. My trust fund was frozen, and I was told I was no longer an Acosta. My fiancé, Auston, had already discarded me, calling me a "bloated whale" while he looked for a thinner, wealthier replacement. I left New York on a Greyhound bus, weeping into a bag of chips, a broken woman the world considered a mistake. I couldn't understand how my own father could tell me to die "quietly" just to save face for a party. I didn't know why I had been a lab rat for my family’s pharmaceutical ambitions, or how they could sleep at night while I was left to rot in the gray drizzle of the city. Five years later, the doors of JFK International Airport slid open. I stepped onto the marble floor in red-soled stilettos, my body lean, lethal, and carved from years of blood and sweat. I wasn't the "whale" anymore; I was a ghost coming back to haunt them. With my daughter by my side and a medical reputation that terrified the global elite, I was ready to dismantle the Acosta empire piece by piece. "Tell Francis to wash his neck," I whispered to the skyline. "I'm home."

Nicole had entered marriage with Walter, a man who never returned her feelings, bound to him through an arrangement made by their families rather than by choice. Even so, she had held onto the quiet belief that time might soften his heart and that one day he would learn to love her. However, that day never came. Instead, he treated her with constant contempt, tearing her down with cruel words and dismissing her as fat and manipulative whenever it suited him. After two years of a cold and distant marriage, Walter demanded a divorce, delivering his decision in the most degrading manner he could manage. Stripped of her dignity and exhausted by the humiliation, Nicole agreed to her friend Brenda's plan to make him see what he had lost. The idea was simple but daring. She would use another man to prove that the woman Walter had mocked and insulted could still be desired by someone else. All they had to do was hire a gigolo. Patrick had endured one romantic disappointment after another. Every woman he had been involved with had been drawn not to him, but to his wealth. As one of the heirs to a powerful and influential family, he had long accepted that this pattern was almost unavoidable. What Patrick wanted was far more difficult to find. He longed to fall in love with a woman who cared for him as a person, not for the name he carried or the fortune attached to it. One night, while he was at a bar, an attractive stranger approached him. Because of his appearance and composed demeanor, she mistook him for a gigolo. She made an unconventional proposal, one that immediately caught his interest and proved impossible for him to refuse.

Five years into marriage, Hannah caught Vincent slipping into a hotel with his first love-the woman he never forgot. The sight told her everything-he'd married her only for her resemblance to his true love. Hurt, she conned him into signing the divorce papers and, a month later, said, "Vincent, I'm done. May you two stay chained together." Red-eyed, he hugged her. "You came after me first." Her firm soon rocketed toward an IPO. At the launch, Vincent watched her clasp another man's hand. In the fitting room, he cornered her, tears burning in his eyes. "Is he really that perfect? Hannah, I'm sorry... marry me again."

I had been a wife for exactly six hours when I woke up to the sound of my husband’s heavy breathing. In the dim moonlight of our bridal suite, I watched Hardin, the man I had adored for years, intertwined with my sister Carissa on the chaise lounge. The betrayal didn't come with an apology. Hardin stood up, unashamed, and sneered at me. "You're awake? Get out, you frumpy mute." Carissa huddled under a throw, her fake tears already welling up as she played the victim. They didn't just want me gone; they wanted me erased to protect their reputations. When I refused to move, my world collapsed. My father didn't offer a shoulder to cry on; he threatened to have me committed to a mental asylum to save his business merger. "You're a disgrace," he bellowed, while the guards stood ready to drag me away. They had spent my life treating me like a stuttering, submissive pawn, and now they were done with me. I felt a blinding pain in my skull, a fracture that should have broken me. But instead of tears, something dormant and lethal flickered to life. The terrified girl who walked down the aisle earlier that day simply ceased to exist. In her place, a clinical system—the Valkyrie Protocol—booted up. My racing heart plummeted to a steady sixty beats per minute. I didn't scream. I stood up, my spine straightening for the first time in twenty years, and looked at Hardin with the detachment of a surgeon looking at a tumor. "Correction," I said, my voice stripped of its stutter. "You're in my light." By dawn, I had drained my father's accounts, vanished into a storm, and found a bleeding Crown Prince in a hidden safehouse. They thought they had broken a mute girl. They didn't realize they had just activated their own destruction.