"The Repairer Of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers

"Ne raillons pas les fous; leur folie dure plus longtemps que la nôtre.... Voila toute la différence."

----
0:00:00 Chapter 1
0:22:06 Chapter 2
0:49:35 Chapter 3
----

You can support me on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/sststr

Time for a little bit of alt-history. Exactly where the timeline for this story diverges from the historical one is not particularly obvious, but it tells us a lot about the author's attitudes on race and society! The book was first published in 1895, so the divergence occurs well before WW1, but still correctly anticipates a war with Germany, interestingly enough. But gives Germany too much success...

I've never encountered the surname of Castaigne before. Castiglione, yes, but Castaigne, no. It appears to be French in origin? But since this story takes place in the USA, I didn't concern myself with trying to give it a proper French pronunciation. It's well known that English-speakers don't do foreign :-P

Traducer: one who attacks the reputation of another by slander or libel.

The pictures used are:

Chapter 1: Hildred Castaigne reading The King in Yellow, by Tucker Sherry (a.k.a. AmazingMoondog), used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en).

Chapter 2: Photo of the statue of Garibaldi in Washington Square, taken Dec 29, 1936. In the alternate history timeline of this story, this statue of Garibaldi was replaced with a statue of Peter Stuyvesant. Obviously no such picture exists, so this is what you get instead.

Chapter 3: The King in Yellow by Propnomicon, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

To follow along: https://gutenberg.org/files/8492/8492-h/8492-h.htm#THE_REPAIRER_OF_REPUTATIONS

There's a sentence in chapter 3 there "As he advanced his, eyebrows contracted, and his lips seemed to form the word 'rubbish.' That's how it is phrased, I didn't read it wrong. I checked multiple sources, they all have that wording. I'm guessing there is a missing word 'eyes' - "As he advanced his eyes...", but I couldn't be 100% sure, so I left it as written, even though it is obviously wrong.