Parisiens and Provinciaux is a short, lively, and good humoured novel,
set in Paris and
Villers-Cotterêts, in which Dumas pokes some affectionate fun at bourgeois
and peasants alike by planting a stuffy Parisian bourgeois and his
household in the countryside with a round lot of shrewd, sharp-dealing
peasants.
M. Peluche, Parisian, bourgeois, royalist, a successful manufacturer of
artificial flowers, travels to Villers Cotterets with his teenaged
daughter, Camille, to visit his old school friend Madeleine. M.
Madeleine, the very picture of unbourgeois irresponsibility, has somehow
made his fortune, retired to the country, and invites Peluche to go hunting
with him. En route, Peluche is persuaded to purchase (for an enormous sum)
the hunting dog from hell, one Figaro, whose character Dumas borrowed from
a dog he described in
Histoire de mes bêtes.
Peluche experiences a series of comic misadventures while hunting with
Madeleine and Figaro, which nearly cost him his life.
Camille meets a wealthy young nobleman, Henri, Comte de Noroy, whom, it
transpires, is somehow Madeleine's godson, and they fall in love. However,
the couple have to overcome a series of obstacles and plot twists: Peluche
objects to aristocrats, Peluche's wife suspects fraud; Henri loses his
fortune and decides to emigrate to South America. Love and Madeleine's
ingenuity overcome the obstacles, and everyone lives happily ever after.
According to a reference in Chapter 1, Parisiens et Provinciaux was begun
by Dumas in Naples circa 1862, but was not published until 1866, when it
appeared as a serial in La Presse. It is the fourth (and last) of Dumas'
naturalistic "pastoral" novels, set in part in Dumas' old home village of
Villers-Cotterêts. (The others are
Conscience l'innocent,
Catherine Blum, and
Le Meneur de loups). An English translation by
A. Craig Bell was
published in 1995 by Karnak House.
