Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Edvard Munch, Louis-Léopold Boilly and Odilon Redon. Two initiates of an ancient order live outside time in Naples: one has forgotten how to feel, the other falls in love with a singer and must choose between immortality and a human life — as the Terror gathers in Paris. Bulwer-Lytton was the most popular novelist of his day and left the language 'the pen is mightier than the sword'; this occult romance was his own favourite and fed a century of secret societies. Fifty-eight plates from Munch to Watteau trace love, alchemy and Vesuvius across two centuries, matching the novel's occult Naples and its gathering revolution.