Some discoloration and starting on cloth cover Pages are yellowed with age Riverside Press, 1942, 679 pages 1655-1714 Paris. Follows two sisters, both beautiful through the trials if their life in Paris high society. Their affairs both literally and figuratively were shocking but mostly because their societal 'friends', took great pleasure in seeing them touted by the pamphleteers, even though they themselves were doing much the same thing. All persons and circumstances in the book are real. Private dialogues are the authors. An intricate, gossipy novel of manners set in the 17th century. The best part is the author's note at the beginning: "None of the characters in this novel is imaginary." All the people, all the affairs, all the adulteries, all the backbiting, all the clothes and vacations and furniture, all the social ins and outs--the author took these delicious things straight from the many memoirs and letters of the social and literary lights of Louis XIV's Paris. The main characters are the beautiful de la Loupe sisters, Catherine and Magdelaine--and if there had been reality shows in the 1600's, theirs would have run for decades. (They both lived into their eighties.)