Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Édouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte and Edgar Degas. A duke's heir substituted at birth, a father who ruined his own son to make him, and twenty years of a secret that several people have a use for. Gaboriau invented the French detective novel out of the police gazettes; here the crime is an old one and the detection almost incidental — what he is really writing is how a family's money makes people behave. Fifty-eight plates after Daumier and Delaroche turn the novel's talk and its hidden transactions into faces at a window, a box at the theatre, a prison cell.
