Alphonse Daudet’s The Nabob, published in 1877, is one of his most ambitious social novels, dissecting the Paris of the Second Empire through the story of Jansoulet, a man who made an enormous fortune in Tunisia and returns to France to buy social respectability — only to find that money alone cannot purchase what he wants. Daudet’s portrait of political corruption and social hypocrisy is drawn with his characteristic warmth and precision.
This second volume resolves the narrative. Daudet was one of the most popular French novelists of his generation. Download this public-domain text as a free EPUB.