Two officers, friends since boyhood, love the same woman, and the friendship is the real subject - a short German romance about honour, and about the point at which honour stops being a virtue. Fouqué was a Prussian cavalry officer of Huguenot descent who fought Napoleon and wrote Undine, German Romanticism's most enduring fairy tale. This is the same sensibility, condensed.

Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777-1843) was a German writer of the Romantic era. A former Prussian officer, he published from Berlin, producing the novella Undine (1811) and the novel The Two Captains.