Numa Roumestan Reading Order

Numa Roumestan (1881) by Alphonse Daudet is his masterwork in the political-social novel — the portrait of a Provençal politician who rises to become a minister of the Third Republic, whose southern exuberance, oratorical brilliance, and cheerful mendacity make him irresistible to the voters and voters and devastating to his Norman wife Hortense who cannot survive in the gap between his promises and his acts. The novel is Daudet's most sustained analysis of the contrast between the Midi (the south of France — effusive, improvising, living in the moment, treating language as music rather than as information) and the Nord (the north — reserved, literal, holding people to what they say) as character types and cultural formations. Numa is the Midi type at its most successful and most destructive: his speeches are brilliant and meaningless, his promises are real in the moment of making and forgotten before the ink dries, his domestic infidelities are not cruelties but the natural overflow of an organism too full of life to be contained by the conventions of bourgeois marriage. Daudet's achievement is that Numa is both entirely convincing as a political type and genuinely sympathetic — the novel is not a satire of the south but a tragic comedy of the cultural mismatch between two ways of inhabiting language.