Lost Illusions

Complete and unabridged, with 37 full-page plates by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Honoré Daumier and Émile Édouard Mouchy. A provincial poet comes to Paris to be famous and discovers how journalism, publishing and the theater are actually bought and sold. Balzac had been ruined as a printer himself; this is the most exact account of the literary marketplace ever written, and it destroys everybody ...