A young musician, ill and exhausted, is taken up by a Chaldean mystic in Paris who explains that electricity is the medium of the soul, and offers a demonstration. Corelli outsold Wells, Kipling and Conan Doyle combined and was Queen Victoria's favorite; this was her first book, in 1886, and the electric theology in it was taken perfectly seriously by a great many intelligent readers. Sixty plates by Hammershøi and Munch, among others, dwell on figures at pianos and in quiet rooms, matching the novel's inward, music-haunted search for the soul.