Taking its inspiration from Shakespeare's idea of the 'seven ages' of a human life, this anthology brings together the poems in English. Beginning with babies, it is divided into sections on childhood, growing up, making a living and making love, family life, getting older, and approaching death, ending with poems of mourning and commemoration.

In eighteenth-century France there lived a man Jean-Baptiste Grenouille who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.

Tells of the career of a hot-blooded middle-class politician whose sexual energies bring him much success with women.

'On the morning of April 16, Dr Rieux emerged from his consulting-room and came across a dead rat in the middle of the landing.' It starts with the rats. Vomiting blood, they die in their hundreds, then in their thousands. When the rats are all gone, the citizens begin to fall sick. Like the rats, they too die in ever greater numbers.