Although Eugène Fromentin published only one novel, his place among the important writers of the nineteenth century has been secured by the continuing popularity of that work. By the early years of this century, more than thirty printings of Dominique (1863; translated, 1932) had appeared, clear evidence of the novel's reception by Fromentin's contemporaries. That number now exceeds one hundred.

Dominique belongs in part to the tradition of the "intimate" confessional novel, in which the narrator recounts the sentimental adventures of his younger self as seen and judged through the eyes of the present. Sometimes apologetic, sometimes critical, almost always nostalgic, such narrators give a very personal and usually tendentious tone to their story. Within this context Dominique falls chronologically and thematically between François-René de Chateaubriand's René (1805; translated, 1813) or Benjamin Constant's Adolphe (1816; translated, 1816) and Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; translated as The Wanderer, 1928). In other...