Complete and unabridged, with 100 full-page plates by Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Luc-Olivier Merson. A young man of good family falls in love with the most expensive courtesan in Paris. Her price is not the obstacle; his father is, and so is her illness. Dumas fils wrote it at twenty-three out of his own affair, and every tragic romance since has been working from his blueprint. Paintings of the demimonde — opera boxes, boudoirs, carriages strewn with camellias. The Gilded Library decoration takes the flower itself, an opera glass and a bundle of letters. Its 91 original illustrations have been carefully restored and coloured for this edition.