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, Emile Zola, and Marcel Proust.

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

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