The Beautiful Lady, and Other Stories

An Italian nobleman down to his last francs hires out his own beautiful head as a walking advertisement — the name of a Paris hair tonic painted across his forehead — and is seen, thus lettered, by the woman he loves. Tarkington was an Indianapolis man and one of only four writers to take the Pulitzer for fiction twice; this 1905 novella is a small, perfect joke told in the Italian's own broken English. Sixty plates of Paris interiors and street life by painters such as Steinlen and Matisse, from 1795 to 1925, match the café-and-boulevard world Tarkington's lettered nobleman walks through.