About the cover

The figure on the cover of Testing Java Microservices, titled “Visitor to the Tuileries Gardens,” is a hand-colored woodcut from a drawing by Eugène Lami (1800-1890). The illustration was included in an essay in vol. 3 of Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: Encyclopédie morale du dix-neuvième siècle (“The French painted by themselves: moral encyclopedia of the nineteenth century”), a multivolume work by Louis Curmer, published in Paris in the early 1940s. This work presented a fascinating picture of French society through representative characters and was particularly interested in popular types and small trades. Five volumes were devoted to Parisians and three to the French provinces and colonies.

The diversity of the figures in this collection reminds us vividly of the uniqueness and individuality of the world’s towns and regions 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. The collection brings to life a sense of isolation and distance of that period—and of every other historic period except our own hyperkinetic present.

Dress codes have changed since then, and the diversity by region, so rich at the time, has faded away. It’s now often hard to tell the inhabitant of one continent from another. Perhaps we’ve traded a cultural and visual diversity for a more varied personal life—or a more varied and interesting intellectual and technical life.