The Mask

A New York husband goes abroad, meets a criminal who has his own face, and learns that the man is the twin brother stolen by gypsies as a baby. The brother leaves him for dead aboard the liner Abyssinia, the newspapers report her lost with all hands, and the double comes home in his place to a wife who half believes him. Hornblow edited Theatre Magazine and turned successful plays into novels; this one keeps the stage melodrama's pace, and the return from the dead is handled with some skill. Fifty-eight plates drawn from Boldini and Degas to Courbet follow the novel's backstage Paris and its theatre world, from Rejane on stage to an argument in the corridors of the Opera.