New work from the acclaimed author of The Crab Nebula and Palafox. It may not be immediately clear why anyone should bother to demolish Nisard. Who on earth, after all, is Désiré Nisard? A nineteenth-century literary critic, pedagogue, and member of the Académie Française, an ardent champion of the glories of seventeenth-century France, an implacable foe of the literature of his own age, a long-forgotten footnote in literary history. An unprepossessing specimen, to be sure, but what harm can he...