Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué

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.