The Nabob. Alphonse Daudet

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The Nabob - Alphonse Daudet


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       Alphonse Daudet

      The Nabob

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066225698

       INTRODUCTION

       BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

       THE NABOB

       by Alphonse Daudet

       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

       Truly Fortune in Paris has bewildering turns of the wheel!

       THE FESTIVITIES IN HONOUR OF THE BEY

       A CORSICAN ELECTION

       Pozzonegro—near Sartene.

       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”

       “Take your places for the first act!”

       Table of Contents

      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


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