Conscience

A young doctor of great promise marries money, and the money has a condition attached that he discovers only when the man who holds it will not die on schedule. Malot abandoned law for journalism and wrote some seventy novels, one of which — Sans Famille — outlived them all; this one is his study of a conscience being negotiated with, item by item, by a man who is not a villain. Thirty-nine plates, among them Rembrandt and Thomas Eakins, track the bargaining conscience through three centuries of portraits and moral scenes.