DAUDET AND HIS WRITINGS
Alphonse Daudet was born at Nîmes, France, May 13, 1840. Here and at Lyons he received his education. At the age of seventeen he and his brother Ernest went to Paris, where Alphonse published his first long poem two years later. This began his literary success. From 1860 to 1865 he served as secretary in the Cabinet of the Duke de Morny, and at the early age of twenty-five was decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honor. He was profoundly impressed by the memories of his early life and frequently revisited his native Provence. The South-of-France tone is distinguishable in much of his work, just as the powerful feelings called forth by the Franco-Prussian war find expression in other of his writings. He died in Paris, December 16, 1897.
Alphonse Daudet was a dramatist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. The Nabob, Sappho, Jack, Kings in Exile, Numa Roumestan, Fromont and Risler, The Evangelist, and the “Tartarin” books are his best known novels. Among his best short-stories are “The Pope’s Mule,” “The Death of the Dauphin,” “The Three Low Masses,” “The Elixir of the Reverend Father Gaucher,” “Old Folks,” and “Master Cornille’s Secret”—all from the collection, Letters from My Mill. The following little masterpieces are from his Monday Tales: “The Game of Billiards,” “The Child Spy,” “The Little Pies,” “Mothers,” “The Siege of Berlin,” and “The Last Class.”
At the close of the Franco-Prussian war, in 1871, France was forced to cede to Germany almost all of Alsace, about nine thousand square miles of territory, in addition to an indemnity of one billion dollars. “The Last Class” was held, therefore, about 1872, and the story was first published in 1873.
Daudet’s literary genius sounded every note, from farce, delicate humor, and satire, to poetic pathos, dramatic action, character analysis, and social criticism. He resembled Dickens in his humor, but displayed more emotional tenderness, and, in his later work, more satire, than did the English writer. Though he may be called the literary descendant of Balzac, whose novels systematically depicted French society in all its phases, Daudet was less a social philosopher and more a man expressing his own personality through his work. Comparing him with Maupassant, we find his stories less perfect in form, but far richer in human feeling. Though at times he dealt with subjects which English readers consider broad, his sympathy unmistakably appears to be with his nobler characters.
When only ten years of age, I was already haunted at times by the desire to lose my own personality, and incarnate myself in other beings; the mania was already laying hold of me for observing and analyzing, and my chief amusement during my walks was to pick out some passerby, and to follow him all over Lyons, through all his idle strollings or busy occupations, striving to identify myself with his life, and to enter into his innermost thoughts.—Alphonse Daudet, Thirty Years of Paris.
Daudet expresses many things; but he most frequently expresses himself—his own temper in the presence of life, his own feeling on a thousand occasions.—Henry James, Partial Portraits.
Life, as he knows it, is sad, full of disappointment, bitterness, and suffering; and yet the conclusion he draws from experience is that this life, with all its sadness, is well worth living.—René Doumic, Contemporary French Novelists.
The short stories are Daudet at his best, a style tense, virile, full of suppressed energy.... There is a nobler strain in these stories than speaks from the pages of Le Petit Chose [“Little What’s-His-Name”],—the ring of passionate patriotism, no longer the voice of Provence, or of Paris, but the voice of France.... The touching story, La Dernière Classe, might have come from the lips of an Alsatian, so true is it to the spirit of Alsace during those sorrowful days that followed the Franco-Prussian War.—Marion McIntyre, Introduction to Works.
Daudet’s two main series of stories (Letters from My Mill and Monday Tales) contain between sixty and seventy pieces.... They represent Daudet the poet, with his exquisite fancy, his winning charm, his subtle, indescribable style, his susceptibility to all that is lovely and joyous in nature and in human life; in short, in his sunny, mercurial Provençal temperament.... But there was another Daudet more or less superimposed upon this sunny, poetic Daudet, true child of Provence. Upon few Frenchmen of a generation ago did the terrible years of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune produce a more sobering impression. The romanticist and poet deepened into a realistic observer of human life in all its phases.—W. P. Trent, Introduction to the volume on Daudet, in Little French Masterpieces.
The charm reflected in his works lay in the man himself, and earned for him a host of friends and an unclouded domestic life—it lay in his open, sunny, inconsequent, southern nature, with his quick sympathies, his irony at once forcible and delicate, his ready tears. It lay in the spontaneousness of his talent, in his Provençal gift of improvisation.... And it lay, too, in what was an essential characteristic of his nature, his rapid alternation of mood. Take even the slightest of his Contes [stories].... Within a few pages he is in turn sad, gay, sentimental, ironical, pathetic, and one mood glides into the next without jar or friction.—V. M. Crawford, Studies in Foreign Literature.
His stories first of all amuse, excite, distress himself.... He never could, indeed, look on them disinterestedly, either while they were making or when they were made. He made them with actual tears and laughter; and they are read with actual tears and laughter by the crowd.... But he had no philosophy behind his fantastic and yet only too probable creations. Caring, as he thought, supremely for life, he cared really for that surprising, bewildering pantomime which life seems to be to those who watch its coloured movement, its flickering lights, its changing costumes, its powdered faces, without looking through the eyes into the hearts of the dancers. He wrote from the very midst of the human comedy; and it is from this that he seems at times to have caught the bodily warmth and the taste of the tears and the very ring of the laughter of men and women....—Arthur Symons, Studies in Prose and Verse.
FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON DAUDET
Chats about Books, Mayo W. Hazeltine (1883); French Fiction of To-day, M. S. Van de Velde (1891); Alphonse Daudet; a Biographical and Critical Study, R. H. Sherard (1894); The Literary Movement in France, Georges Pellissier (1897); Literary Likings, Richard Burton (1898); The Historical Novel, Brander Matthews (1901); French Profiles, Edmund W. Gosse (1905); Short-Story Masterpieces, J. Berg Esenwein (1912).