aut, essentially honest both of them, thinking little of
self, and sustained by lofty purpose. Naturalistic novelists generally
(and M. Zola in particular), live in a black world peopled mainly by
fools and knaves; from this blunder Daudet is saved by his Southern
temperament, by his lyric fervor, and, at bottom, by his wisdom. He
knows better; he knows that while a weak creature like Christian II. is
common, a resolute soul like Frederique is not so very rare. He knows
that the contrast and the clash of these characters is interesting
matter for the novelist. And no novelist has had a happier inspiration
than that which gave us "Kings in Exile," a splendid subject,
splendidly handled, and lending itself perfectly to the display of
Daudet's best qualities, his poetry, his ability to seize the actual,
and his power of dealing with material such as the elder Dumas would
have delighted in with a restraint and a logic the younger Dumas would
have admired. Plot and counter-plot, bravery, treachery, death,--these
are elements for a romanticist farrago; and in Daudet's hands they are
woven into a tapestry almost as stiff as life itself. The stuff is
romantic enough, but the treatment is unhesitatingly realistic; and
"Kings in Exile," better than any other novel of Daudet's, explains his
vogue with readers of the most divergent tastes.

In "The Nabob," the romantic element is slighter than in "Kings in
Exile;" the subject is not so striking; and the movement of the story
is less straightforward. But what a panorama of Paris it is that he
unrolls before us in this story of a luckless adventurer in the city of
luxury then under the control of the imperial band of brigands! No
doubt the Joyeuse family is an obtrusion and an artistic blemish, since
they do not logically belong in the scheme of the story; and yet they
(and their fellows in other books of Daudet's) testify to his effort to
get the truth and the whole truth into his picture of Paris life. Mora
and Felicia Ruys and Jenkins, these are the obverse of the medal,
exposed in the shop-windows that every passer-by can see. The Joyeuse
girls and their father are the reverse, to be viewed only by those who
take the trouble to look at the under side of things. They are samples
of the simple, gentle, honest folk, of whom there must be countless
thousands in France and even in its capital, but who fail to interest
most French novelists just because they are not eccentric or wicked