Ablaze with intellectual and social change, Paris in the 1830s and 1840s beckons to two English brothers--Frederick and Charles Courtland, an architect and a priest--each of whom is struggling for self-definition and social recognition. Of their lives and this world Sennett has made a remarkable work of fiction that transports the reader into nineteenth century Europe and into the nature and inconsistencies of culture and faith, and the way each is shaped by the passage of time.