He resumed his diplomatic career as Austrian "vice-consul" at Oran, Algeria and also began trading Algerian grown tobacco to Europe in partnership with Rachel's father. He also worked as an inspector for the French "Aigle" insurance company and traveled to Vienna briefly in 1881 at the age of 28 to open one of its branch offices. Returning to Oran, he finally married Rachel, and their first two sons Adolph and Fernand were born there. Two years later in 1884, Jellinek joined the insurance company full-time and moved with the family to Baden bei Wien, Austria, where they lived in the house of a wine dealer named Hanni. His first daughter, Mercédès Jellinek, was born in Baden on September 16, 1889; the name "Mercédès" means "favor", "kindness", "mercy", or "pardon" in Spanish. Rachel died 4 years later, and was buried in Nice. Even so, Jellinek came to believe the name Mercedes brought good fortune and called all his properties after it. One of his sons wrote: "He was as superstitious as the ancient Romans." Jellinek's insurance business and stock-market trading became very successful, and they started to spend the winters in Nice on the fashionable "French Riviera", eventually moving there and establishing links with both international business people and the local aristocracy. Helped by his diplomatic career, he became the Austrian Consul General in Nice and began selling automobiles, mainly French makes, to European aristocrats spending winter vacations in the region. Associated with the automobile business were Leon Desjoyeaux, from Nice, and C. L. “Charley” Lehmann, from Paris. He acquired a large mansion which he named "Villa Mercedes" to run the business from and by 1897 he was selling about 140 cars a year and started calling them "Mercedes". The car business was by now more profitable than his insurance work. It was in Nice that Jellinek became enthralled by the automobile, studying any information that he could gather about it and purchasing successively: a "De Dion-Bouton", a "Léon-Bollée Voiturette", both three-wheelers, and a four-seat "Benz" "motorized-coach". Jellinek greatly admired automobile designer Wilhelm Maybach's work. He promised to buy a shipment of 36 automobiles for 550,000 goldmarks if Maybach could design a great race car for him following his specifications.