The Revenge of Joseph Noirel
The Revenge of Joseph Noirel (French: La Revanche de Joseph Noirel) is a novel by Victor Cherbuliez, published in 1870. Synopsis The scene is laid at Mon Plaisir, near Geneva, the villa-home of the well-to-do bourgeois manufacturer, M. Merion, whose wife has social ambitions of which the daughter Mademoiselle Marguerite is made the innocent victim. Given in a marriage of convenience to M. le Conte d'Orins, she finds the unhappiness of a union without love intensified into horror and dread by the suspicion that her husband has been guilty of a hidden crime. Meanwhile, the hero of the story, Joseph Noirel, is the trusted overseer in the works of M. Merion; having been gradually promoted to this position of responsibility and esteem from that of the starving child of disgraced parents, whom the village crier had rescued and introduced as an apprentice in the factory. On Mademoiselle Marguerite's returning from her years of training in the convent for the aristocratic life to which her mother had destined her, Joseph is captivated by her beauty; and after being thrown together by the accident of a storm, he becomes the hopeless victim of a devouring but unrequited love for her. The marriage