Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by James Tissot, Édouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. A young man of good family falls in love with the most expensive courtesan in Paris, and her price is not the obstacle — his father is. Dumas fils lived it: Marie Duplessis died of consumption at twenty-three, he wrote the novel within a year, and the play and Verdi's opera followed. He spent his life being the illegitimate son of a famous father, and it shows in every page about respectability. Its 91 original illustrations have been carefully restored and coloured for this edition.