The Rise and Fall of César Birotteau

A Paris perfumer decides to expand — a new line, a bigger apartment, a ball to which he invites everyone he owes — and Balzac follows the arithmetic of a small honest man's destruction, franc by franc, with the pitiless attention he usually gave to villains. He worked nights on fifty cups of coffee a day and knew bankruptcy from the inside; he had been ruined as a printer. Fifty-six plates by painters including Edvard Munch and Louis-Léopold Boilly trace the shop counters and small rooms of the commercial city Balzac knew from the inside.