Dynastic Lycia A Political History of the Lycians and Their Relations With Foreign Powers, C... Book

Aura is written in the present tense and the narration is in the second person so the story is very dynamic.
The protagonist is young, ambitious and full of high hopes…
…formerly on scholarship at the Sorbonne, historian full of useless facts, accustomed to digging among yellowed documents, part-time teacher in private schools…
He wants a good work and he finds one… And his employer is a senile general’s widow…
You move aside so that the light from the candles and the reflections from the silver and crystal show you the silk coif that must cover a head of very white hair, and that frames a face so old it’s almost childlike.
But the ancient widow has an angelic niece…
She doesn’t look at you at first, then little by little she opens her eyes as if she were afraid of the light. Finally you can see that those eyes are sea green and that they surge, break to foam, grow calm again, then surge again like a wave.
The tale shows a thick Gothic atmosphere… And it is surrounded with an aureole of the otherworldly mystery… And even the iconography above an altar emits dark rays…
…the grinning demons in an old print, the only happy figures in that iconography of sorrow and wrath, happy because they’re jabbing their pitchforks into the flesh of the damned, pouring cauldrons of boiling water on them, violating the women, getting drunk, enjoying all the liberties forbidden to the saints.
Some secrets in the world you’d better never know… Life is but a nightmare.