Dinah de La Baudraye, married to a stunted and miserly husband in Sancerre, makes herself the literary queen of the province, writing verse and holding a salon of admiring locals. The arrival of the Parisian journalist Étienne Lousteau, who reads aloud scraps of a ridiculous Gothic romance, gives her the chance of a real passion, and a cruel education in Paris.
A sharp, comic study of provincial pretension and literary life from The Human Comedy. Download the free EPUB.