Complete and unabridged, with 97 full-page plates by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Béraud and Édouard Manet. A miser in a provincial town has a fortune nobody suspects and a daughter whose whole inheritance he intends to keep from her; then a bankrupt cousin arrives from Paris with good manners. Balzac wrote it in 1833 and made cheeseparing into tragedy: every candle counted, every sou hoarded, and a life spent in one room. Ninety-seven plates of gardens, woods and kitchen plots by painters from Daubigny to Renoir set beside Balzac's tale of a hoard kept indoors while the world outside grows and ripens.