The text is accompanied by an introduction, textual annotations by the editor, and a map of Paris.

Responses: Contemporaries and Other Novelists illustrates Balzac's immense influence on other writers, among them Charles Baudelaire, Hippolyte Taine, mile Zola, and Marcel Proust.

Twentieth-Century Criticism presents a superb selection of critical writing about the novel.

The critics include Ernst Robert Curtius, Albert Bguin, Erich Auerback, Georges Poulet, Michel Butor, Louis Chevalier, Pierre Barbris, Peter Brooks, Sandy Petrey, Nicole Mozet, and Janet L. Beizer.