Adèle

Celia Pippet, who founded a feminist magazine, boldly steals a strange artifact from Adele's life out of the British Museum. With her friend Martin, a filmmaker, and Tamara Sass, an American academic, she escapes to Bez in the French Pyrenees to avoid being caught and to follow the trail of the alluring Adele. The three plan to make a documentary about a case of high-class prostitution and a crime that went unpunished.

Sixty years earlier, Dr. Jonas Sylvester had rescued Adele from Bez and taken her to Paris, where her enigmatic beauty soon became the stuff of legend. When he sends for his sister Blanche to look after the adolescent Adele, he does not foresee the bond that grows between the two women, or their escape from his tyranny. He takes his revenge.

The novel moves between Blanche's account of her life with Adele and Celia's search for clues to that life. The two threads meet in southern France, where the three friends find out that Blanche exists and learn who Adele really was, which is hard to believe.