.
It has been immensely popular, and thus does not illustrate merely the
taste of an inner circle of its author's admirers. It is not so subtle
a study of character as _Numa Roumestan_, nor is it a drama the scene of
which is set somewhat in a corner removed from the world's scrutiny and
full comprehension, as is more or less the case with _Kings in Exile_.
It is comparatively unamenable to the moral, or, if one will, the
puritanical, objections so naturally brought against _Sapho_. It
obviously represents Daudet's powers better than any novel written after
his health was permanently wrecked, and as obviously represents fiction
more adequately than either of the Tartarin masterpieces, which belong
rather to the literature of humour. 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.
However much we may moralize about its baseness and hollowness, whether
with the Hugo of _Les Chatiments_ we scorn and vituperate its charlatan
head or pity him profoundly as we see him ill and helpless in Zola's
_Debacle_, most of us, if we are candid, will confess that the Second
Empire, especially the Paris of Morny and Hausmann, of cynicism and
splendour, of frivolity and chicane, of servile obsequiousness and
haughty pretension, the France and the Paris that drew to themselves the
eyes of all Europe and particularly the eyes of the watchful Bismarck,
have for us a fascination almost as great as they had for the gay and
audacious men and women who in them courted fortune and chased pleasure
from the morrow of the _Coup d'Etat_ to the eve of Sedan. A nearly
equal fascination is exerted upon us by a book which is the best sort of
historical novel, since it is the product of its author's observation,
not of his reading--a story that sets vividly before us the political
corruption, the financial recklessness, the social turmoil, the public
ostentation, the private squalor, that led to the downfall of an empire
and almost to that of a people.

Daudet drew on his experiences, and on the notes he was always
accumulating, more strenuously than he should have done. He assures
us that he laboured over _The Nabob_ for eight months, mainly in his
bed-room, sometimes working eighteen consecutive hours, often waking
from restless sleep with