Excerpt from Le Nabab: Moeurs Parisiennes IF the N abab could be greatly condensed without loss of literary value, it would not be worth condensing. The justifica tion of such a work as this is that the public for which it is meant is not the public for which Daudet wrote, but one of students, who will read more slowly, and have a different point of view in their aesthetic appreciation. To read the whole of this, or of any similar novel, in a college class would in most of our courses give the author a disproportionate place; yet these naturalistic social studies are perhaps the most striking product of modern French literature and deserve recognition in any serious study of that language. Condensation is there fore a natural recourse, and when we ask ourselves what can best be spared we shall find that we lose least, for our purpose, if we sacrifice the idyllic and romantic portions to the epic and realistic, not because those are less excellent than these, but because they will be less appreciated by our students. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.