At the Sign of the Cat and Racket

Above a draper's shop in old Paris hangs a signboard so ancient nobody can read it; inside, a merchant's daughter is admired by a fashionable painter who has never once considered what she is used to. Balzac opens the Human Comedy with this small book about a marriage between two classes — and shows, in a hundred pages, exactly how it kills her. Sixty plates of painting from 1780 to 1864, by painters including Marguerite Gérard and Louis-Léopold Boilly, capture the quiet interiors, letters and music of the private life Balzac dissects.