They were the children of France’s most celebrated men of nineteenth-century letters and science, the celebrity heirs and heiresses of their day. Their lives were the subject of scandal, gossip, and fascination. Léon Daudet was the son of the popular writer Alphonse Daudet. Jean-Baptiste Charcot was the son of the famed neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, mentor to a young Sigmund Freud. And Jeanne Hugo was the adored granddaughter of the immortal Victor Hugo. As France readied herself for the dawn of a new century, these childhood friends seemed poised for greatness. In Gilded Youth , Kate Cambor paints a portrait of a generation lost in upheaval. While France weathered social unrest, violent crime, the birth of modern psychology, and the dawn of World War I, these three young adults experienced the disorientation of a generation forced to discover that the faith in science and progress that had sustained their fathers had failed them. With masterful storytelling, Cambor captures the hopes and disillusionments of those who were destined to see the golden world of their childhood disappear - and the universal challenges that emerge as the dreams of youth collide with the realities of experience. "Kate Cambor's Gilded Youth reads like a Balzac novel. The reader is enchanted by young Charcot and by Victor Hugo's granddaughter, and comes to loathe the odious Léon Daudet, archetype of French anti-Semites. This book is at once a marvelous narration and a dark vision of the anxieties of familial influence." --Harold Bloom " Gilded Youth is the indispensable companion to Roger Shattuck's classic, The Banquet Years . Drawn with grace, sympathy, and shining intelligence, the characters in Kate Cambor's group portrait are more than engaging. To know them is to understand how their time--a time of great promise and unsurpassed beauty--gave way to a century of unending destruction." --Patricia O’Toole, author of The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880-1918 " Gilded Youth offers a fascinating insight into the long shadows cast by the famous upon their children. The lives of Léon Daudet, Jeanne Hugo, and Jean-Baptiste Charcot are proof that an exceptional heritage can be as much a burden as a blessing. Kate Cambor has written a remarkable book." --Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire " Gilded Youth is a mesmerizing account that blends biography and history of the highest order. Cambor combines a scholar's deep knowledge of French society and politics with a novelist's grasp of psychological nuance. The result is a story about how the most urgent dispositions of the human heart can be shaped by history." --Christine Stansell, author of American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century "This is a Proust lover’s idea of a sexy read: the tale of the offspring of three of belle époque Paris’s most celebrated figures--with a hint of glamour, scandal and approaching doom." --Sarah F. Gold, Publishers Weekly "Gilded Youth is the indispensable companion to Roger Shattuck's classic The Banquet Years. Drawn with grace, sympathy, and shining intelligence, the characters in Kate Cambor's group portrait are more than engaging. To know them is to understand how their time--a time of great promise and unsurpassed beauty--gave way to a century of unending destruction." Kate Cambor received her Ph.D. in history from Yale University. She has written for The American Scholar and The American Prospect , among other periodicals. Cambor lives in New York City. This is her first book. From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Michael Shaer Kate Cambor's first book opens in 1914, the year France lurched from the opulence of the Gilded Age into the clamor of the modern world. Gone were the days when debutantes danced until dawn at mountainside resorts and literary giants such as Victor Hugo and Alphonse Daudet presided over Paris salons. Ushered in was an era of war and disorientation. "The new generation of writers and politicians . . . were engaged in a battle of epic and Oedipal proportions," Cambor writes. "At stake was nothing less than the heart and soul of Mother France." This new age is seen through the eyes of three young Parisians: Léon Daudet was the son of novelist Alphonse Daudet, Jeanne Hugo the granddaughter of Victor Hugo, and Jean-Baptiste Charcot the son of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Each was born at the height of Third Republic society, "poised, more than most, to take advantage of the promises of the dawning century." Instead, the three friends fell victim to a string of personal and political crises. As Cambor notes, the problem was primarily one of momentum -- the "faith in science and progress" that defined the Gilded Age was eroded by the arrival of mechanized combat, psychoanalytic theory and a dizzying rush of experimental art. Born to one era, Charcot, Daudet and Hugo struggled,