Complete and unabridged, with 56 full-page plates by Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Gustave Courbet. A starving escaped convict returns to Paris and wakes among mountains of cabbages: Les Halles at dawn, the belly of the city, where the fat shopkeepers who have everything decide that the thin ones are dangerous. Zola planned twenty volumes to trace one family through the Second Empire; this is the third, and no one has ever written food — cheese, blood, fish, butter — like this. Fifty-six plates by Manet, Caillebotte, Renoir and their circle follow the market's food and the waters that supplied it, from Paris balconies to the mussel-fishers of the Norman coast.