Tobias Smollett - Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom

You can call me Dr. Fathom. Or Count Fathom. But I'm not who I say I am. And can you blame me? My mother was a soldiers' harlot who pocketed extra loot by wandering through the battlefield stripping the dead and dying of valuables. I don't even know who my father was, except he must have had my handsome looks. People liked looking at me. And people liked how I talked too. Early on, I learned that telling the truth didn't get you the same quick reward as telling them what they wanted to hear, being assiduously charming, dissimulating. In a word, lying. I became good at it. And I became the favorite of a rich Hungarian count who took me in and coaxed his pathetically naïve son to look up to me and learn to be like me. Ha! How I wanted to sell my soul to trade places with Renaldo! I wanted his money. I wanted his beautiful life. I wanted his beautiful wife — at least for an extra notch on my belt. This is the story of how I went about achieving those things. It was easy, especially at first. Because, to tell the truth, people secretly yearn for tall tales. — Summary by Arthur Krolman