Le Nabab Reading Order

Le Nabab (1877) by Alphonse Daudet is his most ambitious social panorama, a portrait of the Second Empire in its final days seen through the career of a Provençal adventurer who has made a vast fortune in Tunisia and returns to Paris to buy his way into society and politics. The 'Nabab' — the term for an Englishman enriched in India, here applied to the Provençal parvenu Jean Jansoulet — was read on publication as a portrait of the financier and politician Ernest Bravais, and the roman à clef element gave the novel a succès de scandale. But Daudet's achievement transcends gossip: Le Nabab is a precise social anatomy of the Second Empire's corruption, its culture of speculation and patronage, the machinery by which money was converted into political legitimacy and social access. The novel is particularly strong on the Duc de Mora (the Duc de Morny in reality), the Emperor's half-brother and the most powerful fixer of the regime, and on the artistic milieu of Paris — Daudet gives a full portrait of the theatrical and journalistic world that surrounded imperial patronage. The ending, in which the Empire's fall takes the Nabab down with it, turns the social comedy into something approaching tragedy: Jansoulet's rise and fall is both his personal story and the story of the regime that made such rises possible.