A young Parisian finds his mistress at supper with another man, spends two years proving to himself that nobody is worth anything, and then retires to the country and falls in love with a woman ten years older, whom he proceeds to torment. Musset wrote it at twenty-five, directly out of his affair with George Sand and the winter in Venice that ended it. The diagnosis of his own generation in the opening chapters is the part that has lasted. Sixty plates by painters including Paul Gavarni and Edvard Munch trace the century's tables, from coffee house to roulette wheel, matching the novel's anatomy of a generation.