The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Nabob, by Alphonse Daudet

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Title: The Nabob

Author: Alphonse Daudet

Translator: W. Blaydes

Release Date: March 21, 2006 [EBook #2077]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Dagny; and John Bickers

THE NABOB

by Alphonse Daudet

Translated By W. Blaydes

INTRODUCTION

Daudet once remarked that England was the last of foreign countries to
welcome his novels, and that he was surprised at the fact, since for
him, as for the typical Englishman, the intimacy of home life had great
significance. However long he may have taken to win Anglo-Saxon hearts,
there is no question that he finally won them more completely than any
other contemporary French novelist was able to do, and that when but
a few years since the news came that death had released him from his
sufferings, thousands of men and women, both in England and in America,
felt that they had lost a real friend. Just at the present moment one
does not hear or read a great deal about him, but a similar lull in
criticism follows the deaths of most celebrities of whatever kind, and
it can scarcely be doubted that Daudet is every day making new friends,
while it is as sure as anything of the sort can be that it is death, not
estrangement, that has lessened the number of his former admirers.

"Admirers"? The word is much too cold. "Lovers" would serve better, but
is perhaps too expansive to be used of a self-contained race. "Friends"
is more appropriate because heartier, for hearty the relations between
Daudet and his Anglo-Saxon readers certainly were. Whether it was that
some of us saw in him that hitherto unguessed-at phenomenon, a French
Dickens--not an imitator, indeed, but a kindred spirit--or that others
found in him a refined, a volatilized "Mark Twain," with a flavour of
Cervantes, or that still others welcomed him as a writer of naturalistic
fiction that did not revolt, or finally that most of us enjoyed him
because whatever he wrote was as steeped in the radiance of his own
exquisitely charming personality as a picture of Corot's is in the light
of the sun itse