Numa Roumestan Reading Order

Numa Roumestan (1881) by Alphonse Daudet is his most politically astute novel, a portrait of the southern French temperament in its encounter with Parisian political life — a study of what Daudet calls 'le mensonge méridional,' the southern lie, the irresistible southerner's habit of promising what he cannot deliver and feeling every emotion so completely in the moment that the promise seems genuine while it is being made. The Provençal politician Numa Roumestan is one of the great comic villains of French fiction: a magnificent orator, a warm and generous man, constitutionally incapable of fidelity, who loves his cold Norman wife Rosalie with complete sincerity while being completely unable to resist the temptation of other women. The novel is partly autobiographical — Daudet was himself Provençal and his wife was Norman, and the tension between the southern husband and the northern wife mirrors tensions in his own marriage — but it transcends autobiography in its sociological precision. The political machinery of the Third Republic — the southern constituency, the Paris ministry, the relationship between parliamentary oratory and effective governance — is rendered with the same affectionate but clear-eyed accuracy that Daudet brings to Numa's personal life. The novel anticipates the work of Barrès and Maurras in its treatment of the provincial roots of national politics.