There is the wonderful Nabob himself, risen from nowhere, to whom one of the strange turns of Fortune’s wheel sent a fabulous fortune gathered by his own hard and not too scrupulous hands in Algeria. He is ignorant, vulgar, low, without any very strong moral sense, but with a really kind and good heart: he goes to Paris with his millions, and his millions conquer Paris—as long as they last. All the charlatans circle around him. He is a rich man; he wants now to be a great and a distinguished man; and it is truly wonderful to see how many kind friends spring up to make this rich man great and distinguished in a day. Even the Duke de Mora condescends to sell him his cast-off pictures at ducal prices; the illustrious and philanthropic Dr. Jenkins—Jenkins the great—feeds him on his globules at fees that are fortunes; Felicia Ruys makes a bust of him, and would have married him only that he is stupid enough to have been burdened with a wife; Moessard, one of the vampires of the press, writes the Nabob up, and, when the Nabob at last closes his pocket, writes the Nabob down. And so they go on all of them, in a whirl of gold-dust and pearl-powder and moral filth that is their world until they are swept out, each in his or her way, on the strong eddy that is for ever noiselessly, silently, relentlessly sweeping off human lives into the vast and eternal hereafter. Alphonse Daudet has all the gifts that a powerful novelist needs, and has cultivated them to the highest degree. He writes with that passionless tone of an intense but calm observer who sees things as they are, and sees deeper and farther than other men, and paints his picture with pitiless truth. He misses nothing that can add even incidental effect to the firm yet delicate stroke of his pencil. He writes with that apparent effortless ease which is really the result of the strongest effort in a man who is perfectly master of his work. He has even, we believe, that highest quality—a moral purpose in what he writes. But though he sees virtue and the possibilities of virtue even in his Paris, vice seems too strong for it and always to get the best of the bargain, even if in the end it goes out in darkness, disaster, and despair. This undertone of despair of the good is principally what imparts so unhealthy and morbid an air to his stories. Thackeray pictured bad enough people, and with an awful accuracy. But the devil never had it all his own way in Thackeray’s stories, as he has not in real life. He invariably came out of the fight with his tail between his legs, very limp and woe-begone, and in a disgraceful condition generally. There was rude health and pure blood in all Thackeray’s stories strongly set off against the other side. If M. Daudet could only muster moral pluck enough to make his virtuous people a little more robust and aggressive—and there are plenty of such virtuous people in Paris—his stories would gain rather than lose in tone and make much more