Dr. Jenkins and the Innocents

Daudet develops his portrait of Parisian society as sapped of vigor, both physical and financial. For physical vigor, the elite rely on the arsenic pills of the Irish physician Jenkins: for capital, they rely on the North African based wealth of the feuding financers Jansoulet and Hemerlingue.

Hemerlingue's employee M. Joyeuse, a widower with four devoted daughters, is introduced. He is subject to Walter Mittyesque daydreams of great bravery. Summoned by speaking tube by Hemerlingue's "oily and gelatinous voice," Joyeuse is informed that he is being discharged, after ten years service, due to having been overheard criticizing a shady deal.

Hemmerlingue: "obese, ill-shaped, and so yellow that his round face with its hooked nose, the head of a fat and sick owl, suggested as it were a light at the end of a solemn and gloomy tunnel. A rich Moorish merchant grown mouldy in the damp of his little courtyard."

Joyeuse is offered a position at the corrupt Territorial Bank of Corsica, now flush with money due to the Nabob, but refuses out of a sense of probity (for which he second-guesses himself).
Another figure in the Nabob's circuit is the sculptress Felicia Ruys. Her father, a renown sculptor and center of a Bohemian artistic circle, was a friend and patient of the ubiquitous Jenkins. Felicia taunts Jenkins by stating that it is artists who are now respectable and nobles, such as his clients, who live tenuous financial existences. "Ah! If we knew how much terpitude, what fantastic or abomidable stories, a black evening-coat, the most correct of your hideous modern garments can mask."

Felicia, born of one of her father Sebastian's many mistresses, grew up in a corner of his studio, from which she observed the Bohemian life. Some regularity is brought into her life -- she is "noisy, turbulent, ill-behaved -- by summers with a retired dancer, Constance Cremnitz, who adoringly refers to the motherless girl as "the little demon."

When her father becomes ill, the doctor Jenkins becomes her "friend, confidant, a vigilant and kind guardian." That kindness turns out to be a mask -- one of several worn by the hypocritical Irishman -- when the doctor attempts to violently seduce the 15 year old girl. He warns her not to tell her father as "it would kill him."

When the sculptor dies asking Jenkins to "look after my daughter," she is fortunate they the old dancer intervenes, taking the girl under her wing. As she comes into her young maturity, Felicia nurses a secret loathing for the hypocritical doctor.

Jenkins pet project, funded by the Nabob, is "The Bethlehem Society for the Suckling of Infants," a "mournful place" within the grounds of which orphans are given over to goats ("magnificent goats, Thibetan goats, silky, swollen with milk") for feeding. Except that the obstinate infants refuse to do so, "they did not suck them, they preferred to die one after another rather then suck them."

The director of the institution, Pondevez, sees the flaw: "Was Jesus of Bethlehem in his stable suckled by a goat? On the contrary, did he not press a woman's soft breast on which he could go to sleep when he was satisfied? Who ever saw a host between the ox and the ass of the story on that night when the beasts spoke to each other? Then why lie about it, why call the place Bethlehem?"

But when Pondevez tries to save the infants in his charge by bringing in wet nurses, Jenkins is outraged: "Are you out of your mind? Well! Why then have we goats at all, and meadows to pasture them; what becomes of my idea, and the pamphlets upon my idea? What happens to all that? You are going against my system!" of the fate of the starving, goat-resistant infants, the physician concludes: "let them go without, but let the principle of artifical lactation be respected! We are here for the demonstration of a philanthropic idea. It must be made to triumph, even at the price of some sacrifices."

As the death toll of infants increases, Pondevez wryly refers to himself no longer as "Monsieur the Director Pondevez" but rather as "Monsieur the Grantor-of-Certificates-of-Death Pondevez."

Journalists paid by the Nabob write articles praising the Bethlehem Society, with the result that Jenkins receives a government decoration, frustrating the Nabob, who continues to fund the misbegotten philanthropic scheme in the hope that his "cross and brevet" will come next.

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