THE NABOB.
A hundred years ago Le Sage wrote these words at the head of Gil Blas:
"As there are persons who cannot read a book without making personal application of the vicious or absurd characters they find therein, I hereby declare for the benefit of such evil-minded readers that they will err in making such application of the portraits in this book. I make public avowal that my only aim has been to represent the life of mankind as it is."
Without attempting to draw any comparison between Le Sage's novel and my own, I may say that I should have liked to place a declaration of the same nature on the first page of The Nabob, at the time of its publication. Several reasons prevented my doing so. In the first place, the fear that such an advertisement might seem too much like a bait thrown out to the public, an attempt to compel its attention. Secondly, I was far from suspecting that a book written with a purely literary purpose could acquire at a bound such anecdotal importance, and bring down upon me such a buzzing swarm of complaints. Indeed, such a thing was never seen before. Not a line of my work, not one of its heroes, not even a character of secondary importance, but has become a pretext for allusions and protestations. To no purpose does the author deny the imputation, swear by all the gods that there is no key to his novel—every one forges at least one, with whose assistance he claims to open that combination lock. It must be that all these types have lived, bless my soul! that they live to-day, exactly identical from head to foot. Monpavon is So-and-So, is he not? Jenkins' resemblance is striking. One man is angry because he is in it, another one because he is not in it; and, beginning with this eagerness for scandal, there is nothing, not even chance similarities of name, fatal in the modern novel, descriptions of streets, numbers of houses selected at random, that has not served to give identity to beings built of a thousand pieces and, moreover, absolutely imaginary.
The author is too modest to take all this outcry to himself. He knows how great a part the friendly or treacherous indiscretions of the newspapers have had therein; and without thanking the former more than is seemly, without too great ill-will to the latter, he resigns himself to the stormy prospect as something inevitable, and simply deems himself in duty bound to affirm that he has never, in twenty years of upright, literary toil, resorted to that element of success, neither on this occasion nor on any other. As he turned the leaves of his memory, which it is every novelist's right and duty to do, he recalled a strange episode that occurred in cosmopolitan Paris some fifteen years ago. The romance of a dazzling career that shot swiftly across the Parisian sky like a meteor evidently served as the frame-work of The Nabob, a picture of manners and morals at the close of the Second Empire. But around that central situation and certain well-known incidents, which it was every one's right to study and revive, what a world of fancy, what inventions, what elaboration, and, above all, what an outlay of that incessant, universal, almost unconscious observation, without which there could be no imaginative writers. Furthermore, to obtain an idea of the "crystallizing" labor involved in transporting the simplest circumstances from reality to fiction, from life to romance, one need only open the Moniteur Officiel of February, 1864, and compare a certain session of the Corps Législatif with the picture that I give of it in my book. Who could have supposed that, after the lapse of so many years, this Paris, famous for its short memory, would recognize the original model in the idealized picture the novelist has drawn of him, and that voices would be raised to charge with ingratitude one who most assuredly was not his hero's "assiduous guest," but simply, in their infrequent meetings, an inquisitive acquaintance on whose mind the truth is quickly photographed, and who can never efface from his memory the images that are once imprinted thereon?
I knew the "real Nabob" in 1864. I occupied at that time a semi-official position which forced me to exhibit great reserve in my visits to that luxurious and hospitable Levantine. Later I was intimately associated with one of his brothers; but at that time the poor Nabob was far away, struggling through thickets of cruel brambles, and he was seen at Paris only occasionally. Moreover, it is very unpleasant for a courteous man to reckon thus with the dead, and to say: "You are mistaken. Although he was an agreeable host, I was not often seen at his table." Let it suffice therefore, for me to declare that, in speaking of Mère Françoise's son as I have done, it has been my purpose to represent him in a favorable light, and that the charge of ingratitude seems to me an absurdity from every standpoint. That this is true is proved by the fact that many people consider the portrait too flattering, more interesting than nature. To such people my reply is very simple: "Jansoulet strikes me as an excellent fellow; but at all events, if I am wrong, you can blame the newspapers for telling you his real name. I gave you my novel as a novel, good or bad, without any guaranty of resemblances."
As to Mora, that is another matter. Something has been said of indiscretion, of political defection. Great Heaven! I have never made a secret of it. At the age of twenty, I was connected with the office of the high functionary who has served as my model; and my friends of those days know what a serious political personage I made. The Department also must have strange recollections of that eccentric clerk with the Merovingian beard, who was always the last to arrive and the first to depart, and who never went up to the duke's private office except to ask leave of absence; of a naturally independent character, too, with hands unstained by anything like sycophancy, and so little reconciled to the Empire that, on the day when the duke proposed to him to enter his service, the future attaché deemed it his duty to declare with touching juvenile solemnity that "he was a Legitimist."
"So is the Empress," was His Excellency's reply, and he smiled with calm and impertinent condescension. I always saw him with that smile on his face, nor had I any need to look through keyholes; and I have drawn him so, as he loved to appear, in his Richelieu-Brummel attitude. History will attend to the statesman. I have exhibited him, introducing him at long range in my fictitious drama, as the worldly creature that he was and wished to be, being well assured that in his lifetime it would not have offended him to be so presented.
This is what I had to say. And now, having made these declarations in all frankness, let us return to work with all speed. My preface will seem a little short, and the curious reader will seek in vain therein the anticipated piquancy. So much the worse for him. Brief as this page may be, it is three times too long for me. Prefaces have this disadvantage, that they prevent one from writing books.