Alphonse Daudet

A Paris wallpaper firm, two partners - one who works and one who charms - and the second partner's wife, who intends to be seen. Daudet came to Paris from Provence at seventeen and made his name with Tartarin; this 1874 novel won the Académie's prize and is his hardest, a study of how a business and a marriage are dismantled by one woman's appetite and one man's decency.