Pelham by Edward Bulwer Lytton Baron Lytton

In Paris, a young narrator drifts from gambling rooms to salons, from opera and fencing to cabarets and literary gatherings, discovering a city where wit, appetite, and danger mingle at every turn. In the Palais Royal he is unnerved by Thornton, an anxious gambler shadowed by a dark stranger whose demonic delight at the man's loss hints at hidden hostility and ruin. As his Parisian education deepens, Lord Vincent becomes both companion and satirist, skewering vanity, pretension, and social climbing with dazzling precision while leading the narrator through fashionable society, classical quotations, and extravagant pleasures. Meals, flirtations, and comic scandals follow, including a monkey bought for amusement that bites a guest and sparks chaos with the hotel mistress. Beneath the farce lies a sharper meditation on vanity, reputation, and the hostility it invites. The narrator's affairs with the Duchess de Perpignan turn from intrigue to menace, and rumors of poisoning and murder intensify the atmosphere of corruption. Drawn onward by curiosity, he seeks Thornton in the old quarter of the Rue St. Dominique, where Paris's faded grandeur seems to conceal even darker secrets. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.