Fromont et Risler Reading Order

Fromont et Risler (1874) by Alphonse Daudet was his first major Realist novel and the book that made his name as a serious novelist rather than a charming Provençal regionalist. The novel follows the partnership between Fromont fils — the weak, pleasure-loving son of a successful Parisian wallpaper manufacturer — and Georges Risler, an honest, hardworking man from the south of France who has risen through the firm and married the wrong woman: Sidonie Chèbe, the daughter of a petty Parisian concierge who has always wanted to rise above her station and will use Risler's goodness to destroy him. The novel turns on the contrast between Risler's provincial integrity (he cannot conceive that his wife is faithless; he signs anything she asks; he trusts everyone) and the Parisian world of social ambition, adultery, and financial ruin that surrounds him. Daudet drew on Balzac's model of the Comédie humaine — the novel is dedicated to Dickens — and created in Sidonie Chèbe a portrait of social ambition and female duplicity that was compared to Emma Bovary and Becky Sharp. The book was serialized in Le Bien public and became a bestseller; it established Daudet's reputation as a major novelist and was followed by Le Nabab, Numa Roumestan, and Sapho.