In Marissa Meyer’s The House Saphir, the orphaned Fontaine sisters survive by treating each day as a controlled performance. Under constant threat of eviction and arrest, Mallory and Anaïs depend on small, improvised cons like selling fake god-relics and staging phony séances to navigate a world that denies them power. The book frames this fraudulence as a complicated strategy shaped by fear and scarcity. Mallory’s choices reveal this most clearly. She invents elaborate illusions of magic while hiding the one ability she actually possesses: She sees ghosts.

The sisters’ lies grow out of economic crisis. With neither relatives nor inheritance, they earn their income through these cons. In the opening chapter, they convince a wealthy man to buy a gilded crow feather as a “god-relic” for 12 lys, a sum Mallory quietly celebrates as a “bargain” (4). This early scene grounds their desperation. Mallory’s main project, a ghost tour of the abandoned House Saphir, relies on fabricated stories and mechanical tricks. Their situation feels especially fragile when their landlady, Madame Cellier, threatens eviction, shouting, “I want you both out of here by nightfall” (61). Scenes like this show how their deceptions grow out of the need to stay sheltered, rather than from any wish to harm others.