Le Nabab

Le Nabab #1-2

by Alphonse Daudet

Une mise en scène de la vie parisienne sous le Second Empire avec ses affaires. Le personnage principal est calqué sur celui d'un milliardaire célèbre qui fit fortune en Egypte avant de revenir en France travailler avec le duc de Morny.

Genres: French Literature, Classics

553 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1877

About the author

Stories of life of French writer Alphonse Daudet of the naturalist school in his native Provence include Lettres de mon moulin (1869).

Louis Marie Alphonse Daudet authored novels. He was the younger brother of Ernest Daudet. He was married to Julia Daudet and the father of Léon Daudet, Lucien Daudet and Edmée Daudet, all writers.

Family on both sides belonged to the bourgeoisie. Vincent Daudet, the father, manufactured silk, but misfortune and failure dogged the man through life. A boyhood depressed Alphonse amid much truancy had. He spent his days mainly at Lyon, left in 1856, and began life as a schoolteacher at Alès, Gard, in the south. The position proved intolerable. As Charles Dickens declared that all through his prosperous career, the miseries of his apprenticeship to the blacking business haunted him in dreams, so after Daudet left Alès, he woke with horror, thinking for months that he still dwelt among his unruly pupils.

On 1 November 1857, he abandoned teaching and took refuge with Ernest Daudet, his brother only some three years his senior, who tried "soberly" to make a living as a journalist in Paris. Alphonse took to writing, and a small volume, Les Amoureuses (1858), collected his poems and met with a fair reception. He obtained employment on Le Figaro, then under energetic editorship of Cartier de Villemessant, and wrote two or three plays; those interested in literature began to recognize him as possessing individuality and promise. Morny, all-powerful minister of Napoleon III, appointed Daudet, who held a post of his secretaries till death of Morny in 1865, and Morny showed Daudet no small kindness. Daudet put his foot on the road to fortune.

From Wikipedia

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Nabob doesn't warrant reading by anyone who has no broader purpose in doing so (I did). Daudet was quite successful in his day, a much lesser French Dickens. In The Nabob he writes fluidly and somewhat romantically about a nouveau riche Frenchman (originally from the south of France, like Daudet) returning from Tunis and determined to buy his way into the upper reaches of Paris society. He is led from one mistake to another, humbled and humiliated. The underlying thesis would appear to be either a) country mouse comes to city and is eaten by the urban cats or 2) Darwinian naturalism rules in French society and disposes of the weak who are only superficially strong.

I read this novel out of curiosity sparked by notes Daudet left behind, emerging post-mortem as In the Land of Pain. What strikes me is that when he was writing a novel, he was "writing," i.e., performing to his audience's expectations of a writer, confirming suspicions, bringing the high low, exposing evil, rendering innocence and giving it a chance to flower. But In the Land of Pain is Daudet in frank dialogue with himself, raw, comic, brutal, ghastly, profound. There is nothing performative about In the Land of Pain, perhaps explaining why it did not emerge for decades after Daudet's death.

When we think about the great writers of Daudet's times, Flaubert, for instance, we realize that the editorials and pirouettes and stereotypes aren't present. His work is immediate, like In the Land of Pain; it's not confected, like The Nabob. Here you have the difference between commercial fiction, another novel, just another novel, and a work of art. Only by dying slowly and horribly (syphilis) did Daudet come to terms with existential issues more enduring than the terms and manners of his own celebrated, but transient, life.

[Eugenio Negro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don't have too much to add to Trent's introduction (though it was written in 1902), in that it's a pretty sharp portrait of the Second Empire, about a guy who gets rich too fast to realize what it's going to mean when people find out about it. Worth reading for all the diachronic excitement of finding details like how at least in 1878 the words "bull and bear market" existed, the casual reference to Ben Franklin as culturally important and the accusation of "chinoiserie," which I first heard in an aside by Duke Ellington, that the Guggenheims or Gügenheims were already a name in Paris in the 1870s.
The book is a solid satire of gilded-age Paris and the unforgivable violence of French colonialism (in a way more honest than even Heart of Darkness), told straight ahead by a writer who was an avowed royalist, antisemite (who dares to invoke "Henri" Heine! Shithead!) and at least casually pro-colonial.
Even if Daudet doesn't have the same ability with characters of Balzac and George Sand, at least his overflow of character development comes out at worst as satiric melodrama, which his audience probably accepted readily. Rather than character development, Daudet relies on verbal wit and timing of character-behavior juxtaposition (I'm trying to say slapstick but including melodrama, not just violent slapstick), which can be slyly hilarious at times even when steeped in those heavy 19th-century narrative manners.
And all this thanks to W. Blaydee, who should be remembered for his translation's huge honesty and humor that push Daudet's "naturalist" prose toward (at least in English) a recognizably modernist frankness.
Balzac it ain't, but fun for the details.

[Sarah Newton · Rating 5 out of 5]

J'étais déjà grande admiratrice de Daudet avant de lire "Le Nabab". C'est un roman plutôt confectionné, peut-être le plus artificiel de toutes ses oeuvres que j'ai lues, mais néanmoins il m'a beaucoup plû. Le récit rappelle Dickens, mais plus sec, moins sentimental, et aussi avec les personnages nettement moins sympathiques, sauf la famille en carton des Joyeuse, qui font le contrepoint à la débâcle affreuse qui se déroule dans le roman.

Ce que j'ai trouvé prenant était le cynisme presque Darwinien de Daudet dans sa description des motivations de tout être humain, même des plus "bons". Dans ce portrait de la vie Parisienne (ou plus largement "française") pendant le Second Empire, personne n'est épargnée ; nous sommes tous complices du fiasco corrompu et corrompant de notre société.

[Andie Samar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Le juro que lo intenté, a todas horas, con snacks, música, en silencio, mañana, noche, intercalando libros, simplemente no pude. Llegué como a la página 130 así que lo voy a marcar como leído porque para mi eso fue un gran esfuerzo.
Admito que el libro tiene tramas interesantes que me gustaría seguir descubriendo pero les juro que siempre que leo este libro no puedo avanzar porque me quedo dormida profundamente, esta muy aburrido y con explicaciones detalladamente largas. No sé que género sea porque novela no parece pero simplemente no entiendo el punto de este libro y sus descripciones extremadamente largas y tediosas.