I can’t remember his name and I can’t seem to Google it up. Here’s what I remember of the story:
There’s this nobleman or arisocrat who is a complete idiot. He’s either English or French, but I’m 75% sure he’s French. I know this is at least before 1920 and I’m thinking it’s early 1800s. Everyone makes fun of him and resents him for being of high class even though he’s frequently embarrassing and rude, and has the IQ of a toddler.
One day, he decides to try his hand at business. The entire town laughs at his stupid, stupid idea, but for some reason, it’s a huge success and everyone now hates him more. He goes on to start several other stupid ventures that keep succeeding out of sheer, dumb luck. Like, a plague or famine strikes at just the right time, a la Forrest Gump and his shrimp company.
One “friend” defrauds him of a large amount of money, but he recovers from that. Some other “friends” convince him to undertake a particularly stupid venture- I think it was selling something to China or Japan - but it ends up working out because the Asians realize they can resell the goods to Russia at huge markup, so now the nobleman is super-rich.
His wife hates him and I think even tries to kill him at some point. Eventually, someone succeeds in killing this guy. Poison? Assassin? Beating to death? I forget. I also vaguely recall something about him blowing his whole fortune on some elaborate garden on his estate and dedicating a lot of money in his will to building statues of himself in the garden and now the wife is bankrupt.
Question: Who is this idiotic, accidentally successful enterpreneur? I know he’s in wikipedia somewhere, because that’s where I first read about him.
