Two couples meet at a German spa for nine seasons, and the American narrator explains that he understood none of it - the affairs, the money, the suicide - until it was over. Ford opened with the line about this being the saddest story he ever heard, and then built the whole book on a narrator who cannot be trusted with a single fact. He wrote it as the Great War began, aged forty. Fifty-six plates span 1795 to 1929, with Tissot and Diday among the painters, tracing the harbors, cathedrals and portraits that shadow this tale of passion and its telling.