A young woman with a fortune and no past that anyone can trace buys her way into the Second Empire's demi-monde and refuses everything it offers her — including a general who is used to being accepted. Massa was a cavalry officer and a marquis who wrote revues for the private theaters of the court he belonged to; he knew every room in this book from the inside. Fifty-nine plates of Renoir and Tissot trace the wooded paths, quiet interiors and elegant women of the Second Empire world Massa knew firsthand.
