Through her connect to the circus, Felix had met Nora in passing at the same party where he first met the doctor, although no one realizes this link at the time.

Robin sails for America, where she meets Nora, a publicist for circuses.

Felix insists that they have a child, even though she does not want to. Once their son, Guido, is born, Robin’s mental state worsens, until one day she admits that she never wanted a child and leaves Felix and Guido.

Soon after, he takes her on a trip to Vienna and marries her.įrom the beginning of their relationship, there is a disconnect between Robin and Felix, and Robin starts a pattern of disappearing for stretches at a time, going out at night and traveling to different cities by train. In an unconventional move, the doctor brings Felix with him on the call. After the doctor and Felix barely wake her with a splash of cold water, Felix returns to the hotel the next day to court her. Their dinner conversation is interrupted by a request that the doctor tend to a young woman at a nearby hotel she has fainted and cannot be revived. Once back in Paris, Felix reconnects with the doctor, who also lives there, and the two meet for dinner. Matthew O’Connor is a middle-aged, American-born student of medicine, specializing in gynecology. While on a visit to Berlin to see some performers whom he has befriended, Felix meets Matthew O’Connor (aka the doctor) at a salon gathering. In his adulthood, Felix moves to Paris and begins to feel a kinship with circus performers, many of whom take on titles of nobility in their stage names. Felix perpetuates the fraudulent claim to nobility and presents himself as Baron Felix Volkbein. Felix grows up under the care of an aunt who knows little of the family’s history. Felix’s father, Guido Volkbein, who died six months prior of a fever, was a man who falsely presented himself as a baron. She dies moments after, leaving him an orphan. The novel opens in a kind of flashback to 1880, as Baronin Hedvig Volkbein is giving birth to her son, Felix. Eliot published it, he described it as a novel which only “sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate.”

Stylistically, a defining characteristic of this novel is its dense poetic language, so much so that when T.S.

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