Infusions of poison and gold: "The Nabob" opens

Alphonse Daudet, The Nabob: Reading Notes, Part I

Daudet's "The Nabob" opens with scenes of the society physician Dr. Jenkins, a native of Ireland, who has built a wealthy clientel on the basis of miraculous arsenic-based pills that lend an unnatural energy and glow to the eyes of those who take them. Jenkins patients are described as "worn out, debilitated" and "exhausted by an absurd life" to the extent that it is only his miraculous pills that give "the lash of the whip to their jaded existances."

Jenkins also has a scheme for the establishment of a hygenic nursery, "The Bethlehem Society for the Suckling of Infants," for which he seeks to extract funding from M. Jansoulet, a wealthy and generous foreigner whom Paris has nicknamed "The Nabob."

Despite the 1001 Nights monicker, the Nabob is in reality the poor son of a nail-vendor from the south of France who made his fortune in the service of the Bey of Tunis. Having left Tunis and the Bey's service, Jansoulet has determined to make his way in Parisian society. What he most desires is friendship with the First Minister, the Duc de Mora, another of Jenkins' patients.

Daudet describes the wealthy precincts of Paris that contain Jenkins' patients as comfortably shrouded in a morning fog, whereas in the poorer districts of the city, the fog is dissipated, cut-up and absorbed by the masses.

On his rounds, Jenkins visits the Duc, whose waiting room is full, even as he gives his attention to a costumer preparing a dress for the Duchess to wear at an upcoming Ball, "giving his directions with the same gravity with which he would have dictated the draft of a new law."

The Duc's residence has its own radiant warmth and environment into which the enveloping fog does not penetrate. In the entrance hallway "the staircase of shining marble [was] laid with a carpet as thick as the turf of a lawn" and the two blazing fires generate "a factutious sun of wealth."

Jenkins reluctantly leaves the wealthy precincts where his patients reside to visit, at his wife's behest, his stepson, Andre, who has left their home to pursue life as a writer, living on an upper floor of a tenement and seeking to support himself as a portrait photographer. The stepson refuses to accept a proferred position at the nascent Bethlehem Society.

Jenkins' next call is lunch at the recently-taken apartments of the Nabob, which is thronged with aristocrats and schemers seeking funds for their pet enterprises. The guests are noticably bored with the Nabob's conversation and the reading of the press announcement celebrating his charitable funding of the Bethlehem Society -- lauding its reversal of "the long matyrology of childhood" and "the sordid traffic of the breast" -- and only await with anxiety the moment of coffee, which is when the Nabob dispenses his investments, blue paper checques flying. "To sign a check on his knee for two hundred thousand francs troubles Jansoulet no more than to draw a louis from his pocket."

Among the investments the Nabob funds is the near-worthless Territorial Bank of Corsica, which continues to exist only so its principles can continue to try to recoup their losses, in the process cheating others into investing. An interpollated narrative by the Territorial Bank's porter, M. Passajon, who is writing his memoirs, describes a glorious trading floor where only lunch provicions are kept in the empty vaults and another member of the impoverished staff, which has not been paid in four years, crafts shirts from paper to keep-up appearances ("in this he has attained very great skill, and his ever-dazzling linen would deceive, if it were not that at the least movement, when he walks, when he sits down, the stuff crackles upon him as though he had a cardboard box under his waistcoat. Unfortunately, all this paper does not feed him; and he is so thin, he has such a mein, that you ask yourself on what he lives"). The desperate employees of the fraud-ridden bank greet news of new investors such as the Nabob with "dancing, weeping for joy" . . . "men would embrace each other like shipwrecked sailors discovering a sail."

The Minister, the Duc de Mora, arrives at a fete hosted by Jenkins where the eager Nabob is to be presented to his noble idol. Of Mora: "None better than he knew how to bear himself in society, to walk across a drawing room with gravity, to endow futile things with an air of seriousness, and to treat serious things lightly."

The Duke, like all those medicated with Dr. Jenkins arsenical pills, has a fire to his glance: "Oh, this man was a true client of Jenkins; and this princely visit, he owed to the inventor of those mysterious pills which have that fire to his glance, to his whole being that energy so vibrating and extraordinary."

The coy sculptress Felicia taunts the Duke with a fable from Rabelais of the meeting of the fox created by Bacchus "impossible to capture" and the dog of Vulcan with "the power to catch every animal that he should pursue."

The meeting of the wealthy but rough-hewn Nabob with the effete. Minister, whose power comes "from the deep comtempt which he had for man and women." The Nabob looks at him with "the beseeching, submissive eyes of a big, good-tempered mastiff." Daudet notes that "in an American drawing-room the antithesis would have been less violent. The Nabob's millions would have re-established the balance and even made the scale lean to his side. But Paris does not yet place money above every other force . . . ." The Nabob eagerly proceeds to lose money to the Minister at ecart.

The drawing room resounds with whispers of how the Nabob -- formerly a French iron worker -- made his fortune in service of the Bey of Tunis. The scurrulous rumors which have been spread by the Nabob's enemy Hemerlingue, describe both financial chicanery and procurement of European women for the Tunisian harem.

Having heard these rumors, the Nabob's young clerk de Gery looks at his master differently: "Yes, he was indeed the adventurer from the South, moulded of the slimy clay that covers the quays of Marseilles, trodden down by all the nomads and wanderers of the seaport. Kind, generous, foresooth! As harlots are, or thieves. And the gold, flowing in torrents through that tainted and luxurious world, splashing the very walls, seemed to him now to be loaded with all the dross, all the filth of its impure and muddy source."

Other rumors in virulent circulation at the fete suggest that Dr. Jenkins' elegant wife is in reality a courtesan and their marriage a sham.

When de Gery hears from the Nabob the story of his bitter feud with the rival financier Hemerlingue, he warms again to his master and his naive dreams of social success in Paris. De Gery sees the Nabob's passage into Parisian society as akin to "a man on foot laden with gold passing through some evil-haunted wood, in the dark and unarmed."

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