Edmond About — 'French Fiction'

Signed simply T. (identity uncertain), this chromolithograph presents the French novelist and journalist Edmond About three-quarter length, hands thrust into trouser pockets, body angled slightly right. He wears a dark three-piece suit with a loosely knotted cravat and a small lapel button — the Legion of Honour rosette, presumably — and his substantial grey beard and ruffled silver hair carry the breezy confidence of a celebrated man of letters. The caption reads 'French fiction', a double-edged compliment: About was admired in London literary circles yet regarded as slippery in his politics, having shifted from Orleanist liberalism toward strident anti-Prussian nationalism after 1870. The caricature is notably mild by Vanity Fair standards — no ethnic distortion, no grotesque physiognomy — treating About as a robust bourgeois rather than a foreign curiosity, reflecting the magazine's genuine Francophile respect for the Académie française set.