How to Fake It in Society

Nicolas-Marc de Valois-Saint-Rémy de La Motte handed his cane to a footman and strolled into the hubbub of Lady Baskerville’s rout party. A number of heads turned. He heard murmurs.

In principle, murmurs were good. He was perfectly dressed, good-looking to a fault, elegant, interestingly French, even more interestingly parented.

He wanted everyone to be talking about him, all these expensively dressed people in this expensively appointed room.

Everywhere he looked there was satin and silk, china and gilt, noble blood and inherited wealth, diamonds and rubies, and paste that glittered like both, and here he was in the middle of it all, object of a hundred well-bred gazes.