We first read Marian’s account of Count Fosco, where she waxes poetic about how striking his eyes are, how captivating his manners are, how he can command a room so effortlessly, and how he makes her flush whenever he treats her like and equal (when most men do not).
She talks about how she doesn’t know what to make of him, how she can sense there’s something else going on, that his allure might be a lie, but in one way or another, she can not stop thinking about him and it makes her so beautifully frustrated.
So the reader is left with this very memorable, larger than life impression of this strange nobleman as something almost inhuman, you wonder how somebody like this could even exist.
And then you read the other accounts and they’re like ‘yeah he’s this weird old fat guy, foreigners amirite’
Mariam was SO down bad and you don’t appreciate it until the end lol
