La Lumière Qui S'éteint

In 1/1878 Kipling was admitted to the United Services College, at Westward

Ho!, Devon, a school founded a few years earlier to prepare boys for the armed

forces. The school proved rough going for him at first, but led to firm

friendships & provided the setting for his schoolboy stories _Stalky & Co._,

published years later. During his time there, he met & fell in love with

Florence Garrard, the model for Maisie in his 1st novel, The Light That

Failed, initially published in 1890 in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine.

Dick Heldar is a war correspondent & an artist, known for the drawings he

sends home to the London papers from wars in exotic places like Sudan. When he

returns to London, he attempts to make a career for himself as a serious

artist & encounters his childhood sweetheart, Maisie. They fall in love. Then

he learns that a minor problem with his eyes is actually the onset of

blindness, incurable--the result of a head wound he took during the war. As

his vision fails, the light of everything around him--his life, his hopes, his

dreams--fail with it. There are terrible choices to be made between the love

of the woman he treasures & the love of the men who stood by him at the front.