For "Coronet" the author has set] up a huge canvas, spacious enough to permit clearly' defined glimpses of barbaric, glamorous Florence in the days when the trade guilds were a power; of France when the Corsican led his Grand Army to disaster in cruel, frozen Russia; of the period following the Great War; of an inordinately wealthy Chicago pork-packer, dazzled by the gleam of the jowelled coronet, symbol to him of that intangible asset called of the stockyards.
In conformance wit tradition, Komroff is engrossed wi a dominant theme, the inherent evil of aristocracy, whether of birth, of wealth, of intellect or of force.
And he proves his point in vivid episode after episode. Undeniably there is a certain crudeness in some of the scenes, an apparently liberate emphasis on phases of istence hardly pleasant but certainly adding to the force of the whole.
However, the novel by no means with the sordid and the! ion of the death of Chopin in his poor Paris apartment, surrounded by a few friends, with his last request one for music, is done with real understanding.
The poignant story of the singer, Elodie, whose voice charmed the dying composer, is another memorable fragment—the ambitious country girl who found instant success in opera in Paris only to lose her lover in the Napolenie Wars, to have him sent back to her a child, crazed by horror and privation; her dearest friend, the dashing Mai guerite Georges who died in obscure ity; and Chopin, The opening scene of "Coronet,"
the gala occasion when King of the French sends a lion to occupy the ancient pit is out-standing—masked revelers good-naturedly jostling one another in the Street of Lions, Mare-lit; the Marshal of Florence in black silk walking slowly by the side of the French Count de Senlis, steel breast-plates catch the fitful light, which also plays on the hastily erected whipping-posts, on the menacing gibbet at the end of the care-free street, on the symbolic figures of Envy and Gluttony—mammoth and horrible. And on the 's heads in a basket beside the pit, ghastly heads with their ing eyes.—V.K.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.