It was the usual morning news meeting at the publishing house which my husband presided over. One of the employees, a recent addition to the staff, reported that the latest monograph on "generic aristocracy" by a celebrated author, the wife of the publisher and their children, was available at a discount to anyone who paid in advance. I already had a copy of this author's work, titled "ADAM: The Way to Your Mate." I passed on that offer, however, and went on my way. The book turned out to be a good story, one I was able to relate to, considering the modern media's obsession with all things "royal." It was about a man, Adam, who is betrayed by his lover. He goes into a tailspin of revenge, whose effects are only cured when he choses to forgive his lover, who turns out to be his best friend.
By the time I got home in the afternoon, I had learned quite a bit about the family dynamics in this book. The romance, which was central to the plot, was played off against the social status differences of three members of the family, who had become extinct nobility, that is, people who had no right to claim any high position whatsoever. In fact, their titles were invented. The youngest was the only one who was the son of a title holder, descended from the lineage of the last sovereign family, appointed by the courts as the family's representative in the novel's imaginary country. But he was actually a young man by the standards of his family, and thus, while he was heir to any position they might have, he was not considered to be of the aristocracy. Could he marry like an equal, without too many waves? Not without too many waves, it seems.
This was the basis of the plot itself. It got a handle on an unsolved problem, one which still came up today, like in this case, where not all titles are worn with goodwill.
One of the family members was an artist of some kind, which involved being a gifted amateur historian of the time. The book was about imaginary medieval times, so the half-starved peasants probably wouldn't have recognized that he was the historian himself, playing that role from the point of view of a fictional child. The painter was not able to create his portraits from real life, but he did seem to know some of the history from personal experience, which counted, since he was a novelist.
I had understood it as a subtle joke, with all the "costume changes" and "characters in disguise," but I learned that there was some possibility of a serious historical accuracy. There was some kind of problem there. More on that later.
The woman in this book, the author and descendant of an imaginary sovereign family, was really the aristocrat in the family, the one who had been elevated to the highest position in the real family. She was the only one without such an exalted title. But while the husband was truly a man of the masses, the wife remained above everyone else. This was one of "those plots," in which a woman leads the man around by the nose, as if he was a puppet on strings. This was played for romantic comedy, so it was all fun and games, with no hard feelings, as long as the man was a willing player in the game.
The youngest child was the traditional provocatrice, the voluptuous beauty, but she was a woman at a very different level, but with the same rank. She was the so-called lady-in-waiting, who governed the household. In this book, she was a victim, but of something other than the obvious. From the point of view of how it would have to be done, she was a safe, high-value human sacrifice, whose prized purity was preserved, as it was in ancient times, in the old tradition of providing a bride price in exchange for marriage.
Another family member, the woman married to the artist, reminded me of a rather secretive Renaissance saint, a woman who had dedicated her life to the arts, but she wasn't allowed to take on a life in the open, because outwardly she was indistinguishable from a man. It was that cousin of Nobodaddy, who had such enormous creative capacity. I wasn't sure whether she was an ordinary person by birth, or had successfully transformed herself into the ideal image of a real woman, from the outward appearance, which was wearing a masculine costume.
But the only real disappointment was the man who was a real person, the hero, who was mentioned under various scientific titles and things like that. He was an obscure sounding name, which made him into a nobleman of the times, with all the privileges that accompany that kind of name. He was a true aristocrat, the kind who calls everyone else a ''commoner,'' even if no one inside the family talks like that.
But how could Adam be the hero, since he was the one person who would have had no shot in the old days, as all of his ancestors just happened to be common, not aristocratic. He would have been a regular person, with no way to distinguish himself from the masses. No such thing as a "commoner" had always existed.
This was the problem, which caused me to have misgivings.
All the other members, including the author and all the rest of her relatives, who had been turned into stock characters, were also people not to be messed with. They were necessarily real, real people from our modern world, who had the same pitfalls that made everyone uncomfortable, and the same problems of discipline and control, which annoyed everyone else. Many secrets were hidden behind this facade, but I had no interest in the more mundane things, which would make up the normal stuff of life, which people didn't make into romance novels.