Louis Couperus was beyond doubt the leading novelist of Holland in his day; the only one of its authors then to have been translated into English, French, and German. This first novel drew down upon Couperus the displeasure of Holland's religious papers; one of them alleged that the book was responsible for a young man's suicide, while others clamored for the institution of a national Index Expurgatorius, so that all such pernicious literature might be safely disposed of. It is said that the author of Fate, who was born at The Hague in 1863, is of Scottish ancestry, his surname being really a Latinized form of "Cowper."