Cecil Castlemaine's Gage

Ouida's society tales glitter with wit, vanity, and peril, moving through French gardens, Versailles salons, and polished drawing rooms where rank and romance collide. A dead priest beneath the limes, a grieving dog, and a marquise who receives murder with tears, perfume, and chocolate set the tone for a world in which elegance conceals moral decay and passion can turn fatal. Across the collection, titled flirtations, matchmaking schemes, chaperones, generals, and would-be lovers expose the comic absurdities and sharp social pressures of aristocratic life. Yet beneath the satire lies real feeling: a woman's pride masks inner anguish, a man answers with restrained devotion, and Lady Marabout weighs marriage as both private hope and public strategy. In Versailles, Gaston de Launay, a young priest, is drawn into a dangerous affair with Madame la Marquise Léontine de Rennecourt, caught between religious duty and seductive temptation, while the court treats love as a clever game. Elegant, ironic, and psychologically acute, these stories reveal desire, scandal, ambition, and heartbreak in all their glittering forms. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.