The Progress of Julius, first published in 1933, is the third novel by Daphne du Maurier. My hardback edition was published as No. 5 in the Vanguard Library in 1952. It is divided into five parts and runs to 247 pages.
According to The Encyclopedia of Hammer Films, Roy Skeggs announced this in 1990 as a four-part television mini-series with a script by veteran TV writer Allan Prior (Z-Cars).
Julius Lévy is born in Puteaux, near Paris, in 1860; his father is a Jew but his mother and his domineering grandfather are Jew-haters. They live comfortably enough on the earnings from their market stall but grandfather instils in Julius the joy of getting something for nothing. Grandfather is killed in front of him by invading Prussians. Julius and his parents have to flee to Paris. Rather than leave his cat behind for someone else to look after Julius drowns her. They live as refugees, cold and hungry; Julius hunts rats and sells them for food; he finds himself in a Jewish Temple and feels like he belongs there; he catches his mother sleeping with the young man they share a room with and tells his father, who strangles her as Julius urges him on. Julius understands that his father felt about his mother like he had felt about his cat - it was better that they die than be possessed by someone else. The boy and his father manage to escape Paris and get to Algeria where, worn out by his privations, the father dies.
Julius stays at the Alger synagogue for years, receiving free board and lodging on the pretext that he is studying to be a Rabbin; secretly, he is stealing, swindling and robbing, leaving a merchant for dead in one incident. Hearing that England is rich and full of fools he resolves to learn the language and blags himself free lessons from a gay pastor. When he leaves for London, Julius is followed by Elsa, a child prostitute who had been brought to Algeria from France and who is in love with him; she claims he has been the only client she has slept with. He finds a job in a bakery; he learns and takes over the business, expands it into a café that grows and grows; all the time he and Elsa live cheaply as he puts all his time and effort into work. His profits are so great that Julius plans to expand in the West End. Elsa contracts tuberculosis; the doctor tells him it is possible that she could be cured, at great expense, but that would mean Julius would have to slow down his expansion plans. Elsa lives only three more months, as the doctor had told him.
Julius is making so much money that he starts to be noticed. He is taken under the wing of an elderly Jewish banker who is determined to get Julius out of his meagre way of living and into the world. He resolves to marry Rachel Dreyfus, the daughter of a Jewish diamond merchant, after his first meeting with her; it is not love at first sight, nor lust, but something else. Rachel almost dies in childbirth, Julius having absented himself for business dealings during most of the long labour, but she has a daughter, Gabriel. When his father-in-law loses his fortune in the Boer War Julius, unbeknown to Rachel, refuses to help him and the old man shoots himself. Julius expands and expands his business, invests in the stock market, lives a life of luxury and power, takes mistresses. On his fiftieth birthday, he signs a deal that will mean a Lévy café in every town in England, his dream fulfilled, a millionaire. He realises he has no friends, tired of mistresses years before, is bored and lonely.
Gabriel, now 15, whom he has barely seen during her childhood, becomes his new project; he indulges her every whim, buying properties and stables and vessels when her interests fluctuate from hunting to horse racing to yachting. Rachel is shut out of their lives, even when she reveals that she has terminal cancer; she kills herself after her daughter’s lavish 18th-birthday party. The Great War provides Julius with the opportunity to vastly increase his fortune; his supposed “patriotism” earns him a baronetcy; out of boredom he runs for Parliament and gets elected; out of boredom he buys some failing provincial newspapers and revives their fortunes with scandal and populism. All the while, Gabriel is his companion and his hostess. When he discovers that she has taken a belated interest in men, Julius’ possessiveness becomes stalkerish; he tries to keep her apart from men, spies on her every move; when he she tells him that, in spite of his efforts, there is someone she has fallen for … he drowns her.
Sir Julius, never suspected of his daughter’s death, retires to Paris. Realising that he doesn’t belong anywhere, he resolves to build a lavish mansion for people to envy. He tires of everything, except food and drink; he runs to fat; he retreats from the company of everyone but servants; he visits the synagogue and feels nothing; he becomes paranoid that he will lose his fortune and becomes a miser, denying himself adequate coal for his fire and eating cheaply. He succumbs to a stroke that leaves him paralysed and unable to talk. At the last, before he dies, he is reduced to a state of infantilism, reaching out to the clouds and the sky, thinking he can possess them.
It’s a terrific novel, as you’d expect from Du Maurier, with such obvious parallels with Citizen Kane that one wonders if Welles was influenced by it. Clearly, it would have been an expensive undertaking to adapt it for television with its multiple locations and lengthy timeframe. There’s also the problem that Julius is an unspeakably horrible character so spending nearly four hours in his company might have been a challenge. Kane is an occasionally monstrous character but Julius is a monster all of the time, essentially a narcissistic sociopath, like so many of those in power in 2020. That makes it a novel that has none of its relevance nearly ninety years after it was written and I recommend wholeheartedly.