In Scribe's Le Puff (1848) – translated here as Believe It or Not – an honourable cavalry officer returns to Paris after five years abroad to find his countrymen happily addicted to exaggeration, dissimulation and downright lying. Can he find happiness and keep his integrity in a world where nothing is what it seems?
The enduring qualities of Scribe's work – the complex yet elegant plotting, the quirky characters, the sharply-written dialogue – are all very much in evidence, as with bouyant cynicism he skewers the worlds of letters, finance and politics.
