Complete and unabridged, with 37 full-page plates by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Honoré Daumier and Émile Édouard Mouchy. A provincial poet comes to Paris to be famous and discovers how journalism, publishing and the theater are actually bought and sold. Balzac had been ruined as a printer himself; this is the most exact account of the literary marketplace ever written, and it destroys everybody in it. This edition adds 37 plates after Daumier, Jelgerhuis, Pęczarski and others, 16 illustrations restored and coloured, and Ellen Marriage's translation.