ABSTRACT
Anatole France describes an exclusive world, the realm of mondanite opened onto the public sphere via both politics and cultural life. These realms were explored in divorce novels of the 1890s, one by Alphonse Daudet and two by Edouard Rod, not least because divorce threatened to expose intimacy to the public gaze, in spite of the press restrictions of 1886. In these novels, the father–daughter relationship lends particular acuity to the pain of divorce. First, Rose et Ninette, subtitled Moeurs du jour, represents Daudet’s mature reflection on the fate of family life since the advent of the Loi Naquet. From Daudet’s secular view, such social fragmentation was far more perturbing. Indeed, the corollary context in which to read Rose et Ninette is the effect of divorce on the literary circle which he inhabited, for the sorry tale of paternal alienation which this novel relates both reflects and anticipates actual divorce cases which were to touch the author profoundly.
