Complete and unabridged, with 52 full-page plates by Gustave Caillebotte, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Édouard Manet. A schoolmaster's son grows up poor in Paris, loses his father, keeps his mother, falls in love above him, and finds out what a small salary means. Coppée was called the poet of the humble for his verse about clerks and seamstresses, and was elected to the Académie at forty-two; this novel is that sympathy at length — nothing extraordinary happens, and the accumulation is the point. Fifty-two plates by painters from Spitzweg to Renoir follow the same modest lives through piano lessons, river banks, and small pleasures.