THE PORTRAIT

Laurain’s first novel, a mordant fairy tale originally published in France in 2007 and in the U.K. in 2016, finally makes it across the Atlantic.

Burgundy patent attorney Pierre-François Chaumont is addicted to auctions and collecting. His wife, Charlotte, doesn’t share his passion, and she’s recently demanded that he banish all his objets d’art to his study. Soon after he begins to sneak them back into the rest of their house, he stumbles on a painting that will determine the remainder of his life: a portrait of Louis-Auguste, Comte de Mandragore, a friend of King Louis XVI who went into hiding during the Terror and assumed the identity of Auguste Chaumont, a country locksmith. From the moment he sees the painting, the collector knows he must possess it because it looks exactly like him. When he buys it for nearly 12,000 euros, Charlotte, who doesn’t see the resemblance at all, withdraws from him in a cold fury, and the gulf between them has widened considerably by the time Chaumont walks into a café in Rivaille and is immediately mistaken for Aimé-Charles de Rivaille, the current Comte de Mandragore, who vanished during a trip to Paris four years ago. Originally determined to burst this illusion, Chaumont is carried along by the villagers’ obvious excitement at seeing their friend return and goes along with the masquerade, encouraged by the fact that Mélaine de Rivaille, the count’s wife, joyfully accepts him as her husband and takes him to bed. This wildly improbable idyll can’t last, of course, and it’s particularly appropriate that it’s ended by the imposter’s plan to recover all the treasures he left behind.

Slight but magical.