The Reverberator

An American girl in Paris tells a chatty compatriot everything about the aristocratic French family she is to marry into, and he prints all of it in a society paper back home. James settled in England and took British nationality at the last; this 1888 novella is his funniest treatment of the American press, and the horror of the French relations at being written about is done without one raised voice. Sixty plates of Paris life by painters including Mary Cassatt and Jean Béraud, from theatre boxes and boulevards to the Longchamp races, give the city the story moves through its own face.