Ces dames, physionomies parisiennes

Sixth edition, with a photograph of three women reading, mounted as frontispiece.

Bradel binding in brown half cloth with corners, signed Carayon, sides in French curl paper, black morocco title label to spine, fleuron, gilt rules, wrapper preserved. Very slight rubbing to the binding, soiled wrapper, light waterstaining to the first leaves, some foxing.

Auguste Vermorel, a man of letters and journalist who would become a figure of socialism and of the Paris Commune, began his writing career with this study of manners, published anonymously in 1860. Ces dames, physionomies parisiennes belongs to the then fashionable genre of the physiologies and offers a gallery of satirical portraits of lorettes, dancers and demi-mondaines of the Second Empire, among them the celebrated Rigolboche, a figure of the cancan at the Casino-Cadet, to whom the author devotes several pages. Copies are illustrated with photographic portraits by the duo Pierre Petit and Antoine-René Trinquart, a process still rare in ordinary trade editions at that date. The success was immediate, and at least five reprints followed in succession as early as 1860: the 4th, 5th and 6th are known, illustrated with different photographic portraits, evidence of the craze for this light literature devoted to the female figures of the capital's nightlife and theatre world. 

A curious testimony to the Parisian taste of the second half of the 19th century for these female figures of the demi-monde.