In Honoré de Balzac’s vast cycle The Human Comedy, the book The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans occupies a special place. The chapters of this brilliant serialized novel — filled with tense intrigue, an almost detective-like plot, and a large number of characters — were published in Parisian newspapers over the course of ten years.

The result was a mercilessly realistic portrait of Paris on the eve of the July Revolution of 1830 — a city of dazzling balls and filthy, dimly lit slums, of society beauties and fallen women, moneylenders and young ambitious men, aristocrats, bankers, policemen, and convicts. In this city, everything is for sale — even love and virtue — and the morals of those called “the cream of society” differ little from the ethics of the criminal underworld.

The lyrical thread of the novel is connected with the transformation of a fatal beauty, a courtesan who falls in love with an ambitious poet, thus anticipating the central theme of The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, fils.