Farina

Cologne in the Middle Ages: a young man, a girl, a smell of sanctity, and the Devil — Meredith's second book of fiction and a burlesque, in which the perfume that made Cologne famous is traced to a source no one expected. He read manuscripts for a publisher for years, turning down other men's novels; this 1857 book is the one where his own style had not yet become difficult, and it is very funny. Fifty-nine plates, from Cranach to Munch, trace the young woman through five centuries of portraiture, a fitting companion to Meredith's tale of a girl at the center of an old city's legend.