Adele Spitzeder is not the kind of woman literary history usually rescues. She was a mediocre actress, a swindler, and, in a century that had no word for it, a woman who arranged her entire life around other women and never once explained why.In 1869 she borrowed a hundred gulden from a carpenter and promised him ten per cent a month. He told people. Within three years Munich had given her a fortune: laundresses, farmhands, servants, small farmers, village priests, whole parish cou...