Publisher's Synopsis
The tale begins with a rebellious, Francophile, American woman married with small kids vacationing in Southern France. While her tiresome husband is in the US, she falls for a totally charming Frenchman, a man who is already having two affairs. She is convinced she still has 'it' - her beauty will win him away from both: one is poor, but beautiful - the other, homely, but wealthy. ...But the night she is about to make her move, the charmer disappears throwing her into a deep depression. Agonizing over the untimely death of his newborn son, he avoids his 'deflowered' American, one of his artichoke petals. Alarmed, the woman's maid wires a 'come-here-quick' note to the American cuckold. When he arrives, he sees the skeleton of his 'liberated' wife, a discarded artichoke petal, drawn, vacant, sullen who he magnanimously nurses back to health. On their way back to America, nearly recovered from her depression, a sudden, tragic series of events explode as the novel comes to a tumultuous end. Completed in 1933 the author skillfully traces the mental changes of the female protagonist, gives intimate details of the affair, masterfully describes the charming social and physical milieu of day-to-day life of Southern France prior to the buildup to World War II. A page turner, the first of several, posthumous novels by an as yet unknown author with consummate writing talent. A SPECIAL NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: In the Acknowledgment (p. ii) and Notes by the Editor (p.271) some people have misinterpreted the expression, 'copy editing', to mean changing the author's text from the original to something the editor felt was better. This could not be further from the truth. Enormous effort was made to retain every word in the original, 85-year-old manuscript. The transcription of this document to a digital format created hundreds of errors that had to be laboriously removed, corrected, or replaced ... word-by-word. Also, the spelling of the many foreign and scientific terms had to be checked. The correction of occasional grammatical errors was performed. Also, consistent use of italics had to be addressed. The editor called this tedious work 'copy editing' (better perhaps, 'proofreading), a process so exhausting the editor felt he should take credit.
