Translator’s Note

This delicate story is Louis Couperus’ third novel. It appeared in the original Dutch some twenty-seven years ago and has not hitherto been published in America. At the time when it was written, the author was a leading member of what was then known as the “sensitivist” school of Dutch novelists; and the reader will not be slow in discovering that the story possesses an elusive charm of its own, a charm marking a different tendency from that of the later books.

Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

Chelsea, 2 June, 1919