The Latin Quarter in the 1890s: four art students, a studio, a model, absinthe, and a young American who takes it all more seriously than his friends do. Chambers trained as an artist in Paris himself before turning to fiction, and The King in Yellow made him a name Lovecraft would later borrow from; this 1894 first novel is the Quarter as he lived in it, with the poverty left in. Fifty-nine plates by Degas and Steinlen, among others, track the dancers, laundresses, and evening streets of the Paris Chambers knew.
