Delphi complete works of.., p.129
Delphi Complete Works of Alphonse Daudet (Illustrated), page 129
When they arrived at the outer door, Charlotte stopped. “I cannot go on,” she said, “I am frightened.”
“Come on,” the other answered, roughly; “you must. Ah, to such women as you, God should never give children!”
And she pushed Charlotte toward the staircase. The large room, the shaded lamps, the kneeling forms, the mother saw at one glance; and farther on, at the end of the apartment, were two men bending over a bed, and Cécile Rivals, pale as death, supporting a head on her breast.
“Jack, my child!”
M. Rivals turned. “Hush,” he said, sternly.
Then came a sigh — a long, shivering sigh.
Charlotte crept nearer, with failing limbs and sinking heart. It was Jack indeed, with arms stiffly falling at his side, and eyes fixed on vacancy.
The doctor bent over him. “Jack, my friend; it is your mother, she is here!”
And she, unhappy woman, stretched out her arms toward him. “Jack, it is I! I am here!”
Not a movement.
The mother cried in a tone of horror, “Dead?”
“No,” said old Rivals; “no, — Delivered.”
THE END
The Nabob (1877)
Translated by W. Blaydes, 1878
Original French Title: ‘Le Nabab’
Daudet had established himself as a successful author by the mid-1870’s and his reputation would only continue to grow over the following decade. He was much admired by some of the preeminent novelists and writers of the late nineteenth century and was widely read in France and beyond. The renowned American author, Henry James, considered Daudet to be one of the finest French writers of the period and the novelists Robert Louis Stevenson and George Gissing also expressed their high regard for his work. He had been frequently compared to Charles Dickens by some British literary critics and while he denied accusations of imitation, he did consider himself to be interested in and to have ‘...the same love as Dickens has for the maimed and poor, for the children brought up in all the deprivation of great cities’.
First published in 1877, there was mild controversy roused by The Nabob, due to speculation and gossip about whether Daudet had based his characters on real-life people. The author refused to confirm or deny the majority of the rumours, but he did concede that the characters Jansoulet, (The Nabob) and Mora were based on the politician François Bravay and Charles de Morny, respectively. Daudet robustly defended himself against claims of ingratitude and ‘political defection’ in regards to his portrayal of his former employer and he attempted to appease the unhappy family of Bravay by drawing attention to the sympathetic depiction of Jansoulet in the text.
Though historically a title for a Muslim official under the Mogul empire, a ‘nabob’ was a nineteenth century term often applied to a person of conspicuous wealth. The novel introduces Jansoulet as a man that has achieved great riches in Tunisia, who now tries to integrate himself into the social elite of the Second Empire. Nicknamed ‘the Nabob’ by the people he meets and there are many that ask him for loans of money. The novel evokes his social rise and his inevitable fall. It might centre on the specific fortunes of Jansoulet, but in a broader sense it serves as an indictment of the corruption, squalor, incompetence and recklessness that permeated the dying days of The Second Empire.
The first edition’s title page
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
DOCTOR JENKIN’S PATIENTS
A LUNCHEON IN THE PLACE VENDOME
MEMOIRS OF AN OFFICE PORTER A MERE GLANCE AT THE TERRITORIAL BANK
A DEBUT IN SOCIETY
THE JOYEUSE FAMILY
FELICIA RUYS
JANSOULET AT HOME
THE BETHLEHEM SOCIETY
BONNE MAMAN
MEMOIRS OF AN OFFICE PORTER SERVANTS
THE FESTIVITIES IN HONOUR OF THE BEY
A CORSICAN ELECTION
A DAY OF SPLEEN
THE EXHIBITION
MEMOIRS OF AN OFFICE PORTER IN THE ANTCHAMBER
A PUBLIC MAN
THE APPARITION
THE JENKINS PEARLS
THE FUNERAL
LA BARONNE HEMERLINGUE
THE SITTING
DRAMAS OF PARIS
MEMOIRS OF AN OFFICE PORTER THE LAST LEAVES
AT BORDIGHERA
THE FIRST NIGHT OF “REVOLT”
François Bravay, who served as the model for Jansoulet (The Nabob). He was a Jewish politician that was elected as a deputy for Nîmes.
INTRODUCTION
DAUDET ONCE REMARKED that England was the last of foreign countries to welcome his novels, and that he was surprised at the fact, since for him, as for the typical Englishman, the intimacy of home life had great significance. However long he may have taken to win Anglo-Saxon hearts, there is no question that he finally won them more completely than any other contemporary French novelist was able to do, and that when but a few years since the news came that death had released him from his sufferings, thousands of men and women, both in England and in America, felt that they had lost a real friend. Just at the present moment one does not hear or read a great deal about him, but a similar lull in criticism follows the deaths of most celebrities of whatever kind, and it can scarcely be doubted that Daudet is every day making new friends, while it is as sure as anything of the sort can be that it is death, not estrangement, that has lessened the number of his former admirers.
“Admirers”? The word is much too cold. “Lovers” would serve better, but is perhaps too expansive to be used of a self-contained race. “Friends” is more appropriate because heartier, for hearty the relations between Daudet and his Anglo-Saxon readers certainly were. Whether it was that some of us saw in him that hitherto unguessed-at phenomenon, a French Dickens — not an imitator, indeed, but a kindred spirit — or that others found in him a refined, a volatilized “Mark Twain,” with a flavour of Cervantes, or that still others welcomed him as a writer of naturalistic fiction that did not revolt, or finally that most of us enjoyed him because whatever he wrote was as steeped in the radiance of his own exquisitely charming personality as a picture of Corot’s is in the light of the sun itself — whatever may have been the reason, Alphonse Daudet could count before he died thousands of genuine friends in England and America who were loyal to him in spite of the declining power shown in his latest books, in spite even of the strain which Sapho laid upon their Puritan consciences.
It is likely that a majority of these friends were won by the two great Tartarin books and by the chief novels, Fromont, Jack, The Nabob, Kings in Exile, and Numa, aided by the artistic sketches and short stories contained in Letters from my Mill and Monday Tales (Contes du Lundi). The strong but overwrought Evangelist, Sapho — which of course belongs with the chief novels from the Continental but not from the insular point of view — and the books of Daudet’s decadence, The Immortal, and the rest, cost him few friendships, but scarcely gained him many. His delightful essays in autobiography, whether in fiction, Le Petit Chose (Little What’s-his-Name), or in Thirty Years of Paris and Souvenirs of a Man of Letters, doubtless sealed more friendships than they made; but they can be almost as safely recommended as the more notable novels to readers who have yet to make Daudet’s acquaintance.
For the man and his career are as unaffectedly charming as his style, and more of a piece than his elaborate works of fiction. A sunny Provencal childhood is clouded by family misfortunes; then comes a year of wretched slavery as usher in a provincial school; then the inevitable journey to Paris with a brain full of verses and dreams, and the beginning of a life of Bohemian nonchalance, to which we Anglo-Saxons have little that is comparable outside the career of Oliver Goldsmith. But poor Goldsmith had his pride wounded by the editorial tyranny of a Mrs. Griffiths. Daudet, by a merely pretty poem about a youth and maiden making love under a plum-tree, won the protection of the Empress Eugenie, and through her of the Duke de Morny, the prop of the Second Empire. His life now reads like a fairy-tale inserted by some jocular elf into that book of dolors entitled The Lives of Men of Genius. A protege of a potentate not usually lavish of his favours, and a valetudinarian, he is allowed to flit to Algiers and Corsica, to enjoy his beloved Provence in company with Mistral, to write for the theatres, and to continue to play the Bohemian. Then the death of Morny seems to turn the idyl into a tragedy, but only for a moment. Daudet’s delicate, nervous beauty made his friend Zola think of an Arabian horse, but the poet had also the spirit of such a high-bred steed. Years of conscientious literary labour followed, cheered by marriage with a woman of genius capable of supplementing him in his weakest points, and then the war with Prussia and its attendant horrors gave him the larger and deeper view of life and the intensified patriotism — in short, the final stimulus he needed. From the date of his first great success — Fromont, Jr., and Risler, Sr. — glory and wealth flowed in upon him, while envy scarcely touched him, so unspoiled was he and so continuously and eminently lovable. One seemed to see in his career a reflection of his luminous nature, a revised myth of the golden touch, a new version of the fairy-tale of the fair mouth dropping pearls. Then, as though grown weary of the idyllic romance she was composing, Fortune donned the tragic robes of Nemesis. Years of pain followed, which could not abate the spirits or disturb the geniality of the sufferer, but did somewhat abate the power and disturb the serenity of his work. Then came the inevitable end of all life dramas, whether comic or romantic or tragic, and friends who had known him stood round his grave and listened sadly to the touching words in which Emile Zola expressed not merely his own grief but that of many thousands throughout the civilized world. Here was a life more winsome, more appealing, more complete than any creation of the genius of the man that lived it — a life which, whether we know it in detail or not, explains in part the fascination Daudet exerts upon us and the conviction we cherish that, whatever ravages time may make among his books, the memory of their writer will not fade from the hearts of men. Many Frenchmen have conquered the world’s mind by the power or the subtlety of their genius; few have won its heart through the catholicity, the broad sympathy of their genius. Daudet is one of these few; indeed, he is almost if not quite the only European writer who has of late achieved such a triumph, for Tolstoi has stern critics as well as steadfast devotees, and has won most of his disciples as moralist and reformer. But we must turn from Daudet the man to Daudet the author of The Nabob and other memorable novels.
If this were a general essay and not an introduction, it would be proper to say something of Daudet’s early attempts as poet and dramatist. Here it need only be remarked that it is almost a commonplace to insist that even in his later novels he never entirely ceased to see the outer world with the eyes of a poet, to delight in colour and movement, to seize every opportunity to indulge in vivid description couched in a style more swift and brilliant than normal prose aspires to. This bent for description, together with the tendency to episodic rather than sustained composition and the comparative weakness of his character drawing — features of his work shortly to be discussed — partly explains his failure, save in one or two instances, to score a real triumph with his plays, but does not explain his singular lack of sympathy with actors. Nor was he able to win great success with his first book of importance, Le Petit Chose, delightful as that mixture of autobiography and romance must prove to any sympathetic reader. He was essentially a romanticist and a poet cast upon an age of naturalism and prose, and he needed years of training and such experience as the Prussian invasion gave him to adjust himself to his life-work. Such adjustment was not needed for Tartarin de Tarascon, begun shortly after Le Petit Chose, because subtle humour of the kind lavished in that inimitable creation and in its sequels, while implying observation, does not necessarily imply any marked departure from the romantic and poetic points of view.
The training Daudet required for his novels he got from the sketches and short stories that occupied him during the late sixties and early seventies. Here again little in the way of comment need be given, and that little can express the general verdict that the art displayed in these miniature productions is not far short of perfect. The two principal collections, Lettres de mon Moulin and Contes du Lundi, together with Artists’ Wives (Les Femmes d’Artistes) and parts at least of Robert Helmont, would almost of themselves suffice to put Daudet high in the ranks of the writers who charm without leaving upon one’s mind the slightest suspicion that they are weak. It is true that Daudet’s stories do not attain the tremendous impressiveness that Balzac’s occasionally do, as, for example, in La Grande Breteche, nor has his clear-cut art the almost disconcerting firmness, the surgeon-like quality of Maupassant’s; but the author of the ironical Elixir of Father Gaucher and of the pathetic Last Class, to name no others, could certainly claim with Musset that his glass was his own, and had no reason to concede its smallness.
As we have seen, the production of Fromont jeune et Risler aine marked the beginning of Daudet’s more than twenty years of successful novel-writing. His first elaborate study of Parisian life, while it indicated no advance of the art of fiction, deserved its popularity because, in spite of the many criticisms to which it was open, it was a thoroughly readable and often a moving book. One character, Delobelle, the played-out actor who is still a hero to his pathetic wife and daughter, was constructed on effective lines — was a personage worthy of Dickens. The vile heroine, Sidonie, was bad enough to excite disgusted interest, but, as Mr. Henry James pointed out later, she was not effective to the extent her creator doubtless hoped. She paled beside Valerie Marneffe, though, to be sure, Daudet knew better than to attempt to depict any such queen of vice. Yet, after all, it is mainly the compelling power of vile heroines that makes them tolerable, and neither Sidonie nor the web of intrigue she wove can fairly be said to be characterized by extraordinary strength. But the public was and is interested greatly by the novel, and Daudet deserved the fame and money it brought him. His next book, Jack, was not so popular. Still, it showed artistic improvement, although, as in its predecessor, that bias towards the sentimental, which was to be Daudet’s besetting weakness, was too plainly visible. Its author took to his heart a book which the general reader found too long and perhaps overpathetic. Some of us, while recognising its faults, will share in part Daudet’s predilection for it — not so much because of the strong and early study made of the artisan class, or of the mordantly satirical exposure of D’Argenton and his literary “dead-beats” (rates), or of any other of the special features of a story that is crowded with them, as because the ill-fated hero, the product of genuine emotions on Daudet’s part, excites cognate and equally genuine emotions in us. We cannot watch the throbbing engines of a great steamship without seeing Jack at work among them. But the fine, pathetic Jack brings us to the finer, more pathetic Nabob.
Whether The Nabob is Daudet’s greatest novel is a question that may be postponed, but it may be safely asserted that there are good reasons why it should have been chosen to represent Daudet in the present series. It has been immensely popular, and thus does not illustrate merely the taste of an inner circle of its author’s admirers. It is not so subtle a study of character as Numa Roumestan, nor is it a drama the scene of which is set somewhat in a corner removed from the world’s scrutiny and full comprehension, as is more or less the case with Kings in Exile. It is comparatively unamenable to the moral, or, if one will, the puritanical, objections so naturally brought against Sapho. It obviously represents Daudet’s powers better than any novel written after his health was permanently wrecked, and as obviously represents fiction more adequately than either of the Tartarin masterpieces, which belong rather to the literature of humour. Besides, it is probably the most broadly effective of all Daudet’s novels; it is fuller of striking scenes; and as a picture of life in the picturesque Second Empire it is of unique importance.
Perhaps to many readers this last reason will seem the best of all. However much we may moralize about its baseness and hollowness, whether with the Hugo of Les Chatiments we scorn and vituperate its charlatan head or pity him profoundly as we see him ill and helpless in Zola’s Debacle, most of us, if we are candid, will confess that the Second Empire, especially the Paris of Morny and Hausmann, of cynicism and splendour, of frivolity and chicane, of servile obsequiousness and haughty pretension, the France and the Paris that drew to themselves the eyes of all Europe and particularly the eyes of the watchful Bismarck, have for us a fascination almost as great as they had for the gay and audacious men and women who in them courted fortune and chased pleasure from the morrow of the Coup d’Etat to the eve of Sedan. A nearly equal fascination is exerted upon us by a book which is the best sort of historical novel, since it is the product of its author’s observation, not of his reading — a story that sets vividly before us the political corruption, the financial recklessness, the social turmoil, the public ostentation, the private squalor, that led to the downfall of an empire and almost to that of a people.
Daudet drew on his experiences, and on the notes he was always accumulating, more strenuously than he should have done. He assures us that he laboured over The Nabob for eight months, mainly in his bed-room, sometimes working eighteen consecutive hours, often waking from restless sleep with a sentence on his lips. Yet, such is the irony of literary history, the novel is loosely enough put together to have been written, one might suppose, in bursts of inspiration or else more or less methodically — almost with the intention, as Mr. James has noted, of including every striking phase of Parisian life. For it is a series of brilliant, effective episodes and scenes, not a closely knit drama. Jenkins’s visit to Monpavon at his toilet, the dejeuner at the Nabob’s, the inspection of the OEuvre de Bethleem — which would have delighted Dickens — the collapse of the fetes of the Bey, the Nabob’s thrashing Moessard, the death of Mora, Felicia’s attempt to escape the funeral of the duke, the interview between the Nabob and Hemerlingue, the baiting in the Chamber, the suicide of that supreme man of tone, Monpavon, the Nabob’s apoplectic seizure in the theatre — these and many other scenes and episodes, together with descriptions and touches, stand out in our memories more distinctly and impressively than the characters do — perhaps more so than does the central motive, the outrageous exploitation of the naive hero. For from the beginning of his career to the end Daudet’s eye, like that of a genuine but not supereminent poet, was chiefly attracted by colour, movement, effective pose — in other words, by the surfaces of things. One may almost say that he was more of a landscape engineer than of an architect and builder, although one must at once add that he could and did erect solid structures. But the reader at least helps greatly to lay the foundations, for, to drop the metaphor, Daudet relied largely on suggestion, contenting himself with the belief that a capable imagination could fill up the gaps he left in plot and character analysis. Thus, for example, he indicated and suggested rather than detailed the way in which Hemerlingue finally triumphed over the Nabob, Jansoulet. To use another figure, he drew the spider, the fly, and a few strands of the web. The Balzac whose bust looked satirically down upon the two adventurers in Pere la Chaise would probably have given us the whole web. This is not quite to say that Daudet is plausible, Balzac inevitable; but rather that we stroll with the former master and follow submissively in the footsteps of the latter. Yet a caveat is needed, for the intense interest we take in the characters of a novel like The Nabob scarcely suggests strolling.
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