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6. The Physician as Foreigner: Alphonse Daudet's Le Nabab
- University of Nebraska Press
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6 The Physician as Foreigner Alphonse Daudet’s Le Nabab Of Alphonse Daudet’s novels, Roger Williams writes that they “give us life in France between 1860 and 1890 without the political bias that marred Zola’s greater novels about life during the Second Empire.”1 Whether or not one accepts the objective/subjective opposition that Williams regards as the defining distinction between Daudet and Zola, it is clear that the works of Daudet, like those of Zola, have documentary value. For the student of Second Empire France, Le Nabab (1877) is of particular interest. And for the scholar interested in the intersections between literature and medicine, the study of this novel is vital. Written during a brief respite from the symptoms of syphilis, which, according to Williams’s estimates, this close friend of the Goncourt brothers contracted between 1861 and 1863, the novel features an Irish physician, Jenkins, who is perhaps the most striking among the many portraits of physicians in the novels of Alphonse Daudet. A consummate hypocrite whose good looks (he has “the handsome face of a scholar and an apostle” [2:481]) and life-restoring tablets (fatuously named “Jenkins capsules”) have made of him “1864’s most fashionable doctor,” Jenkins comes to symbolize the corruption and materialism of the Second Empire. As the plot unfolds, the reader learns that he has abandoned two wives (the first legitimate, the second common-law), alienated his stepson, and attempted to rape his surrogate daughter. He will continue his work of destruction, murdering the duc de Mora and bringing about the deaths of countless infants, victims of a “philanthropic” plan to 124 the physician as foreigner replace wetnurses with goats. Published the same year as L’Assommoir, Le Nabab lays out in excruciating detail not the physical misery of the indigent but the moral bankruptcy of the wealthy. And, just as the influence of medical discourse on Zola’s novel finds expression in the ideological underpinnings of the plot, in Daudet’s novel, medical presence, here in the form of a physician-character, is oppressive and influential. As a symbol of perverted paternity, the physician plays a central role in the moral decadence of the late–Second Empire society depicted by Alphonse Daudet. Le Nabab relates the tale of one Bernard Jansoulet, a poor southern Frenchman by birth who makes a fortune in Tunisia and, as “a gigantic parvenueagertoenjoylife”(2:500),returnstoPariswithhismillions.The fascination he exercises on the Parisian populace, rendered in culinary terms, suggests that the phonetic proximity of his name to the famous southern French specialty known as cassoulet is not incidental: “It was he, the Nabab, the richest of the rich, a true Parisian curiosity, spiced by that relish of adventure that gives such pleasure to the jaded crowds” (2:525). Jansoulet, in short, represents not the purebred aristocrat, not the “old money” on which power was bestowed in earlier regimes, but the spicier “stew” of new money, money earned mysteriously and perhaps not altogether honestly by a new breed of adventurers and bourgeois materialists. Setting himself up lavishly in an apartment on the place Vendôme, Jansoulet (“le Nabab”) becomes food for all the hungry egotists of Parisian society, from the Corsican Paganetti, who promises him a deputyship in exchange for help in reestablishing the financial health of the Territorial Treasury, to the journalist Moëssard, who expects to be paid for an article praising his generosity. But it is to the physician, Jenkins, who persuades the Nabab to underwrite a charitable project he pompously names “The Bethlehem Society,” that themostnarrativespaceisgiven.Jenkins,flatteringthevanityofthenaive southern Frenchman, promises him the cross of the Legion of Honor, a recognition he covets for himself as well. Like the others, Jenkins fails to live up to his promise, and Jansoulet, disabused by repeated disappointments, begins denying requests for monetary support. In the end, the humiliated Nabab suffers a fatal stroke that is brought on by [54.144.81.21] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:42 GMT) the physician as foreigner 125 the emotional turmoil he experiences when he sees himself derided by former beneficiaries. Daudet, chronicling Jansoulet’s demise, makes extensive use of the theatrical metaphor to expose the hypocrisy of late–Second Empire society. It is not by chance that the novel ends with the successful performance of a play entitled The Revolt, written by the physician’s rebellious stepson, or that Jansoulet dies offstage on the evening of the première, after failing to...