The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol

Aristide Pujol is a Provençal charmer who began life as a page boy in a Nice café and never settled into anything since. Across nine linked stories he surfaces as a nougat salesman, a professor of French at an academy for young ladies, a guide to English tourists, and managing director of a company floated to build a palatial hotel in Perpignan. An English friend tells the tales, half amused and half astonished, as Aristide talks his way into other people’s troubles and out again, usually leaving them better off than he found them. Locke ran the stories in The American Magazine through 1911 and gathered them into a book the following year, and they carry the warm comic sentiment that made him a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Light work, best taken a chapter at a time.