Ourika

Complete and unabridged, with 53 full-page plates by Nicolas Lancret, Joseph Vernet and Jean-Antoine Watteau. A Senegalese girl is bought as an infant and raised in a Paris salon as an aristocrat's ward — loved, educated, and then old enough to notice that no one will marry her. Claire de Duras lost her father to the guillotine and wrote this in 1823 from inside the society she is describing; it i...