Sons of the Soil

A Napoleonic general retires to a country estate and finds the peasants of the district have quietly decided to take it from him, tree by tree and field by field. Balzac worked at it for a decade and left it unfinished; it is the least sentimental book about rural France anyone wrote. This edition carries Katharine Prescott Wormeley's translation and 58 bound plates of painting, 1750–1870, among them Courbet, Beschey, Holden and Nainsukh.