Résumé
Résumé de Le Roman d’un jeune homme pauvre
Go deeper: the whole of Le Roman d’un jeune homme pauvre
About 4 h to read.À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
For readers who love nineteenth-century romance, stories of pride and class, and heroes tested by money, honor and forbidden love.
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The Romance of a Poor Young Man is a French novel by Octave Feuillet, first published in 1858 as Le Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre. Feuillet wrote it in the years of the Second Empire, when Paris society prized money and display. He set against that world a hero who has lost his fortune and refuses to lose his good name. The book was a great success in its day and was soon turned into a stage play.
The hero is Maxime Odiot, a young man of noble birth who has been raised to expect a comfortable life. A sudden ruin strips it away. What follows is a story of duty, work, hidden rank and a love that seems to have no right to exist. You get a gentle romance with a firm moral spine, and a picture of how class and money shaped a person's choices in nineteenth-century France. The first key point is where it all begins: with a debt, and a decision about honor.
Dans ce résumé
- 1Ruin forces a young man to chooseFree
- 2A marquis becomes a hired steward
- 3Love grows across a wall of class
- 4A hidden name and the cost of silence
- 5What honor and money really cost
- 6How Feuillet tells his sentimental tale
Point clé 1 sur 6
Ruin forces a young man to choose
The story opens with Maxime Odiot at the moment his old life ends. He is a young man of good family who has been raised in comfort, with a title, a name and the habits of the rich. Then his family's money collapses, and he learns how much of what he thought was his rests on debts he never knew about.
Feuillet makes this the central test of the book. Maxime could walk away, protect what little is left and let creditors worry about the rest. Other men of his class might call that sensible. He does not see it that way, because for him a family name is a promise, and a promise must be kept.
So the novel begins with a choice that costs him almost everything. He gives up the life he was born to and takes on the duty of settling what is owed. The reader meets him not as a dreamer or a wastrel but as a young man trying hard to behave well when no one would blame him for behaving badly.
This opening sets the tone for the whole novel. The question is not whether Maxime will be rich again. It is what kind of man he will be while he is poor. Feuillet wants you to admire his character before you ever wonder about his luck, and that is why the book is called a romance of a poor young man, and not of a lucky one.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
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Go deeper: the whole of Le Roman d’un jeune homme pauvre
About 4 h to read.Questions about Le Roman d’un jeune homme pauvre
What is The Romance of a Poor Young Man about?
It tells of Maxime Odiot, a young French nobleman ruined by debt, who works as a steward in Brittany under a hidden rank and falls in love with the daughter of the house.
Who wrote The Romance of a Poor Young Man and when?
Octave Feuillet wrote it, and it appeared in 1858 under the French title Le Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre. He later helped adapt it for the stage, where it also did well.
Is The Romance of a Poor Young Man a true story?
Feuillet drew on the real social setting of France under the Second Empire, with its focus on rank, money and reputation in nineteenth-century French society.
What is the main message of the novel?
The book argues that honor and character matter more than wealth or title. It also shows that pride and silence can protect a person and still keep him from happiness.
Is The Romance of a Poor Young Man hard to read?
Not really. The plot is simple and the style is smooth.
Cite this edition
Feuillet, Octave. The Romance of a Poor Young Man. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-romance-of-a-poor-young-man.
Feuillet, O. (2026). The romance of a poor young man. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-romance-of-a-poor-young-man (Original work published 1858)
Feuillet, Octave. The Romance of a Poor Young Man. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-romance-of-a-poor-young-man.
@book{feuillet2026romance,
author = {Feuillet, Octave},
title = {The Romance of a Poor Young Man},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-romance-of-a-poor-young-man},
note = {First published 1858}
}
