MixedThe Washington PostWeber sets out to depict \'them as they wanted the world to see them and as they were when they thought no one was looking.\' Whether you find either vision appealing depends a great deal on your appetite for (nearly 600 pages of) descriptions of aristocratic lineages, amorous intrigue, high fashion, richly decorated houses and endless entertainments ... Occasionally, the much uglier and more violent real world—the Dreyfus Affair and a string of terrifying anarchist bombings, for example—intruded on the snowglobe idyll they so carefully constructed around themselves. But it was an idyll as artificial as it was fragile. Peering into it from the outside and with the hindsight of history, its inhabitants appear not so much fascinating as deluded and, ultimately, sad.
