The Nabob, Volume 1

Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) was a French novelist. He was the father of Léon Daudet and Lucien Daudet. He betook himself to his pen likewise, wrote poems, shortly collected into a small volume Les Amoureuses (1858), which met with a fair reception, obtained employment on the Figaro, then under Cartier de Villemessant's energetic editorship, wrote two or three plays, and began to be recognized, among those interested in literature, as possessing individuality and promise. In 1866, Daudet's Lettres de Mon Moulin, written in Clamart, near Paris, and alluding to a windmill in Fontvieille, Provence, won the attention of many readers. The first of his longer books, Le Petit Chose (1868), did not, however, produce popular sensation. It is, in the main, the story of his own earlier years told with much grace and pathos. Henceforward his career was that of a very successful man of letters, publishing novel on novel, Le Nabab (1877), Les Rois en Exil (1879), Numa Roumestan (1881), Sappho (1884), and L'Immortel (1888).