La taverne du diable (The Devil's Tavern)

About this issue

This French edition (Michel Lévy Frères, 1867) opens on the courtroom confession of Elisa Sydney, whose entire history is then recounted. Elisa is the illegitimate daughter of the deformed Count of Warrington and his beloved companion Letitia Hardinge. Elisa's mother later married the poor farmer's son Stanford Sydney and bore two children: Elisa and sickly Walter. After the parents' deaths, the unscrupulous merchant Robert Stephens gains control of the orphaned children through calculated kindness, learning of a substantial forty-one-thousand-pound inheritance awaiting Walter at majority. When Walter dies in February 1831, Stephens devises an audacious fraud: he persuades young Elisa to assume her brother's identity and male clothing, circulates a false death notice for Elisa, and relocates her to a villa in Clapton to conceal the deception. The narrative concerns this inheritance scheme and its criminal consequences.