Fromont et Risler Reading Order

Fromont et Risler (1874) by Alphonse Daudet is the novel that established his reputation as a major Naturalist writer, a portrait of a Parisian wallpaper manufacturing firm and the bourgeois families connected with it — a social world of work, money, and domestic life rendered with the precision and warmth that became Daudet's signature. The novel centers on the marriage between Risler, a competent but unimaginative craftsman who has risen to partnership in the firm, and Sidonie Chèbe, a vain and ambitious woman from the petty bourgeoisie who uses Risler's love to secure a social position she considers her due. Sidonie is one of the great destructive women of French Naturalism: not the passionate criminal of Zola's Thérèse Raquin, not the provincial Romantic of Flaubert's Emma Bovary, but something more specific and perhaps more dangerous — a cold-blooded social climber whose vanity is never warm enough to rise to the level of passion. Daudet treats her with a clarity that is never quite condemnation: the social system that produced her vanity, and the men who were foolish enough to indulge it, share the responsibility for her destruction. The novel was Daudet's first major success, serialized in Le Bien public in 1874 and published the same year, and it established the social novel of Parisian bourgeois life as his territory.