In this album of pencil sketches, Edgar Degas reveals his journeys through Paris in 1877, capturing images from the ballet and the café-concerts he attended that year. The artist also portrays friends who gathered each week at the home of Ludovic Halévy, a writer of operas and comedies and the recipient of this book. The sketches, in particular those of ballet dancers, show how Degas studied movement in many forms and translated those observations across media in pastel, paint, and wax, cast posthumously in bronze.