About the Cover Illustration

The figure on the cover of PHP in Action is a “Paysanne,” or French peasant woman. The illustration is taken from the 1805 edition of Sylvain Maréchal’s four-volume compendium of regional dress customs. This book was first published in Paris in 1788, one year before the French Revolution. Each drawing is colored by hand.

The diversity of the illustrations in Marechal’s collection speaks vividly of the uniqueness and individuality of the world’s towns and provinces just 200 years ago. This was a time when the dress codes of two regions separated by a few dozen miles identified people uniquely as belonging to one or the other. These drawings bring to life a sense of isolation and distance of that period and of every ...

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