Monsieur, Madame, and Bébé

The courtship, the wedding night, the first baby, the nurse, the mother-in-law, the boredom, and a great deal that the 1860s did not put in print. Droz trained as a painter and exhibited at the Salon for a decade before a magazine asked him for sketches of married life; the book went through a hundred editions and was thought scandalously frank. Fifty-eight paintings by Renoir and Tissot, from riverside meadows to dockyards, echo the book's domestic scenes in the open air.