The Nabob, Volume 1

The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2), by
Alphonse Daudet

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Title: The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2)
Author: Alphonse Daudet
Commentator: Brander Matthews
Translator: George Burnham Ives
Release Date: February 22, 2007 [EBook #20646]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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NABOB, VOLUME 1 (OF 2) ***

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[Illustration: "'Take away your flowers, my dear.'"]

THE NABOB

BY
ALPHONSE DAUDET

TRANSLATED BY
GEORGE BURNHAM IVES

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
BRANDER MATTHEWS

IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.

BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1902
Copyright, 1898, By Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved.
University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE TO FRENCH EDITION

We have been informed that at the time of the publication of The
Nabob in serial form, the government of Tunis was offended at the
introduction therein of individuals whom the author dressed in names
and costumes peculiar to that country. We are authorized by M.
Alphonse Daudet to declare that those scenes in the book which relate
to Tunis are entirely imaginary, and that he never intended to introduce
any of the functionaries of that state.

ALPHONSE DAUDET.
Alphonse Daudet is one of the most richly gifted of modern French
novelists and one of the most artistic; he is perhaps the most delightful;
and he is certainly the most fortunate. In his own country earlier than
any of his contemporaries he saw his stories attain to the very wide
circulation that brings both celebrity and wealth. Beyond the borders of
his own language he swiftly won a popularity both with the broad
public and with the professed critics of literature, second only to that of
Victor Hugo and still surpassing that of Balzac, who is only of late
beginning to receive from us the attention he has so long deserved.
Daudet has had the rare luck of pleasing partisans of almost every
school; the realists have joyed in his work and so have the romanticists;
his writings have found favor in the eyes of the frank impressionists
and also at the hands of the severer custodians of academic standards.
Mr. Henry James has declared that Daudet is "at the head of his
profession" and has called him "an admirable genius." Mr. Robert
Louis Stevenson thought Daudet "incomparably" the best of the present
French novelists and asserted that "Kings in Exile" comes "very near to
being a masterpiece." M. Jules Lemaitre tells us that Daudet "trails all
hearts after him,--because he has charm, as indefinable in a work of art
as in a woman's face." M. Ferdinand Brunetière, who has scant relish
for latter-day methods in literature, admits ungrudgingly that "there are
certain corners of the great city and certain aspects of Parisian manners,
there are some physiognomies that perhaps no one has been able to
render so well as Daudet, with that infinitely subtle and patient art
which succeeds in giving even to inanimate things the appearance of

life."
I.
The documents are abundant for an analysis of Daudet such as
Sainte-Beuve would have undertaken with avidity; they are more
abundant indeed than for any other contemporary French man of letters
even in these days of unhesitating self-revelation; and they are also of
an absolutely impregnable authenticity. M. Ernest Daudet has written a
whole volume to tell us all about his brother's boyhood and youth and
early manhood and first steps in literature. M. Léon Daudet has written
another solid tome to tell us all about his father's literary principles and
family life and later years and death. Daudet himself put forth a pair of
pleasant books of personal gossip about himself, narrating his relations
with his fellow authors and recording the circumstances under which he
came to compose each of his earlier stories. Montaigne--whose
"Essays" was Daudet's bedside book and who may be accepted not
unfairly as an authority upon egotism--assures us that "there is no
description so difficult, nor doubtless of so great utility, as that of one's
self." And Daudet's own interest in himself is not unlike
Montaigne's,--it is open, innocent and illuminating.
Cuvier may have been able to reconstruct an extinct monster from the
inspection of a single bone; but it is a harder task to revive the figure of
a man, even by the aid of these family testimonies, this self-analysis,
the diligence of countless interviewers of