Cécile Theodor Fontane - Man kann die eigene Vergangenheit nicht hinter sich lassen. Bei einer Reise begegnet das Ehepaar Cécile und Pierre von St. Arnaud dem Zivilingenieur Robert von Gordon. Schnell begeben sie sich auf gemeinsame Ausflüge. Das Interesse des Ingenieurs gilt vor allem der jungen Cécile. Sie scheint in Bezug auf viele Themen merkwürdig ungebildet. Ihren Ehemann Oberst Pierre scheint dies jedoch nicht weiter zu verwirren. Auch fällt Gordon auf, dass Cécile auf die Erwähnung sittenwidriger Umstände in Adelskreisen empfindlich reagiert. Dennoch kann er sich nicht von ihr fernhalten und will das Geheimnis um die junge Schönheit entschlüsseln. Doch manches sollte lieber ungeklärt bleiben ...-

Theodor Fontane, novelist, critic, poet, and travel writer, was one of the most celebrated nineteenth-century German men of letters. He was born into a French Huguenot family in the Prussian town of Neuruppin, where his father owned a small pharmacy. His fathers gambling debts forced the family to move repeatedly, and eventually his temperamentally mismatched parents separated. Though Fontane showed early interest in history and literaturejotting down stories in his school notebookshe could not afford to attend university; instead he apprenticed as a pharmacist and eventually settled in Berlin. There he joined the influential literary society Tunnel über der Spree, which included among its members Theodor Storm and Gottfried Keller, and turned to writing. In 1850 Fontanes first published books, two volumes of ballads, appeared; they would prove to be his most successful books during his lifetime. He spent the next four decades working as a critic, journalist, and war correspondent while producing some fifty works of history, travel narrative, and fiction. His early novels, the first of which was published in 1878, when Fontane was nearly sixty, concerned recent historical events. It was not until the late 1880s that he turned to his great novels of modern society, remarkable for their psychological insight: Trials and Tribulations (1888), Irretrievable (1891), Frau Jenny Treibel (1892), and Effi Briest (1895). During his last years, Fontane returned to writing poetry, and, while recovering from a severe illness, wrote an autobiographical novel that would prove to be a late commercial success. He is buried in the French section of the Friedhof II cemetery in Berlin.