A Polish prince, charming and penniless, marries the daughter of a self-made French manufacturer and proceeds to spend the works, the family and the marriage. Ohnet was the best-selling French novelist of his generation and the most despised — Jules Lemaître's demolition of him is still quoted as the model of a bad review. Read him to see what a whole reading public wanted, and why the critics could not stop it. Fifty-four plates of Degas and Caillebotte, milliners and gambling tables, give this novel of Parisian money and its spending the visual world it was written from.
