An Attic Philosopher in Paris

A poor man in a Paris garret keeps a journal of a year: the first of January, a beggar on the stairs, a rich cousin, a dead neighbor's furniture sold off. Souvestre was a Breton lawyer's son who failed as a publisher and taught school before he found his subject — the quiet lives of ordinary Parisians. This 1850 book was read for fifty years as a manual for being poor without becoming small. Sixty plates by painters such as Daumier and Whistler follow the garret year through Paris roofs, rainy bridges and night skies.