Gerfaut

A Paris literary lion seduces the wife of an Alsatian ironmaster, and the husband — a slow, decent, formidable man — declines to behave like a comic figure. Charles de Bernard was befriended by Balzac, who read his admiring review and adopted him; his subject was the drawing room of the July Monarchy, and this is his best-known book. Forty-six plates of portraits and studios by Ingres, Manet and their contemporaries turn the novel's drawing-room intrigues into a painted gallery of the July Monarchy's faces and jealousies.