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Updated: June 17, 2025
Have you read Alphonse Daudet's delightful "Tartarin of Tarascon"? Are you acquainted with the "baobab villa," and the elusive Montenegrin Prince, who had spent three years in Tarascon, but who never went out, and who decamped with Tartarin's well-filled wallet; and the jaundiced Costlecalde, and the embarrassingly affectionate camel, and the blind lion from the hide of which grew the great man's subsequent fame, and all the other whimsical creations of the novelist's pleasant fancy?
The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently; a new volume of Herbert Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet's brilliant tales, and a novel called "Middlemarch," as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews.
Whether The Nabob is Daudet's greatest novel is a question that may be postponed, but it may be safely asserted that there are good reasons why it should have been chosen to represent Daudet in the present series. It has been immensely popular, and thus does not illustrate merely the taste of an inner circle of its author's admirers.
The two characters drawn from life in a special sense for Daudet, like most other writers of fiction, had human life in general constantly before him are Jansoulet and Mora, precisely the most effective personages in the book, and scarcely surpassed in the whole range of Daudet's fiction.
Or who, indeed, wishes to indulge in further comment after the scene has risen to his mind? The Nabob was followed by Kings in Exile; then came Numa Roumestan and The Evangelist; then, on the eve of Daudet's breakdown, Sapho; and the greatest of his humorous masterpieces, Tartarin in the Alps. It is not yet certain what rank is to be given to these books.
The man must be glad to do a man's work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and to keep those dependent upon him. The woman must be the housewife, the helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children. In one of Daudet's powerful and melancholy books he speaks of "the fear of maternity, the haunting terror of the young wife of the present day."
In the triangular space left blank the title of the periodical and the publisher's imprint were tastefully lettered so as to be partly covered by the background of color. "It's like some of those Tartarin books of Daudet's," said Beacon, looking at it with more interest than he suffered to be seen. "But it's a book, not a magazine."
Besides, it is probably the most broadly effective of all Daudet's novels; it is fuller of striking scenes; and as a picture of life in the picturesque Second Empire it is of unique importance. Perhaps to many readers this last reason will seem the best of all.
A contemporary of Daudet's, who possessed a far finer spiritual insight, Coventry Patmore, the poet, in the essay on "Ancient and Modern Ideas of Purity" in his beautiful book, Religio Poetæ, had already finely protested against that "disease of impurity" which comes of "our modern undivine silences" for which Daudet pleaded.
I should have a good deal to say about the novels of M. Zola, and it would be better to say it in an article than in a letter, because there is a general question there which must be formulated with a refreshed brain. I should like to read M. Daudet's book first, the book you spoke of to me, the title of which I cannot recall.
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