In his adulthood, Felix moves to Paris and begins to feel a kinship with circus performers, many of whom take on titles of nobility in their stage names. Felix perpetuates the fraudulent claim to nobility and presents himself as Baron Felix Volkbein. Felix grows up under the care of an aunt who knows little of the family’s history. Felix’s father, Guido Volkbein, who died six months prior of a fever, was a man who falsely presented himself as a baron. She dies moments after, leaving him an orphan. The novel opens in a kind of flashback to 1880, as Baronin Hedvig Volkbein is giving birth to her son, Felix. Eliot published it, he described it as a novel which only “sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate.” Stylistically, a defining characteristic of this novel is its dense poetic language, so much so that when T.S.
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