and equally genuine emotions in us. We cannot watch the throbbing
engines of a great steamship without seeing Jack at work among them. But
the fine, pathetic _Jack_ brings us to the finer, more pathetic _Nabob_.

Whether _The Nabob_ is Daudet's greatest novel is a question that may be
postponed, but it may be safely asserted that there are good reasons why
it should have been chosen to represent Daudet in the present series.
It has been immensely popular, and thus does not illustrate merely the
taste of an inner circle of its author's admirers. It is not so subtle
a study of character as _Numa Roumestan_, nor is it a drama the scene of
which is set somewhat in a corner removed from the world's scrutiny and
full comprehension, as is more or less the case with _Kings in Exile_.
It is comparatively unamenable to the moral, or, if one will, the
puritanical, objections so naturally brought against _Sapho_. It
obviously represents Daudet's powers better than any novel written after
his health was permanently wrecked, and as obviously represents fiction
more adequately than either of the Tartarin masterpieces, which belong
rather to the literature of humour. Besides, it is probably the most
broadly effective of all Daudet's novels; it is fuller of striking
scenes; and as a picture of life in the picturesque Second Empire it is
of unique importance.

Perhaps to many readers this last reason will seem the best of all.
However much we may moralize about its baseness and hollowness, whether
with the Hugo of _Les Chatiments_ we scorn and vituperate its charlatan
head or pity him profoundly as we see him ill and helpless in Zola's
_Debacle_, most of us, if we are candid, will confess that the Second
Empire, especially the Paris of Morny and Hausmann, of cynicism and
splendour, of frivolity and chicane, of servile obsequiousness and
haughty pretension, the France and the Paris that drew to themselves the