In Vanity Fair

Paris seen through its clothes: the tyrants of the Rue de la Paix and the great ateliers, the racecourses where the new models are shown, dining as a fine art, the round of the Normandy resorts, the hunting season at the châteaux, the winter under southern skies — and, last, the American women without whose custom the whole trade would falter. Brainerd wrote light social fiction for the magazines; here she takes the frivolity seriously, and the fashion detail is documentary. Sixty paintings from 1840 to 1910 by Jean Béraud and Gustave Caillebotte, among others, catch the same Parisian boulevards, kiosks and rooftops where the novel's frocks and fortunes are made.