Complete and unabridged, with 57 full-page plates by Jeanne-Élisabeth Chaudet, Jean-François Millet and Honoré Daumier. A provincial French town, a duke's château, a peasant girl the duke's son loves, a murder on the night of a village fire, and a confession extracted from the wrong man. Gaboriau built the French detective novel out of the police gazettes; this long novel is his most political — the vengeance is a whole life's work, and the machinery that convicts an innocent man is not corrupt, merely certain of itself. Fifty-seven plates by painters including Courbet and Millet carry the peasant villages, fields and farm work that surround this story of provincial France.