The Parisians

Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Parisians is a sharp social novel of modern France, with Paris itself as the true central character: glittering, unstable, intellectual, and politically volatile. Framed by a narrator who has come to the city for his health and claims to recount real events in fictional disguise, the story opens in the spring of 1869 amid the crowds of the Tuileries, the Champs-Élysées, and the Bois de Boulogne, where elegance and unease coexist. Into this world comes Alain de Kerouec, Marquis de Rochebriant, a proud young nobleman whose ancestral estate is ruined by debt and whose old line seems to be fading. Reunited with his worldly school friend Frederic Lemercier, Alain is drawn into Parisian society through dinners, salons, lawyers, financiers, and family alliances. He meets the brilliant Lucien Duplessis, a self-made man of power and influence, and confronts the hard realities of modern money, rank, and ambition. As Alain seeks help from the Count de Vandemar, the novel explores the tension between inherited aristocratic ideals and the pragmatic, mercantile spirit of the age. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.