There is one word of all the happy many which, in the opinion of all his critics, fitly characterizes Daudet—he possessed charm, charm of manner personally and charm of literary style. I wish his portrait were before us here, that we might trace in that striking countenance the record of those fascinating qualities of mind and heart which are so patent in his life and work.
As for his person, from boyhood his hair grew in that untamed profusion which we so often associate with strong individuality, and even in later life he wore his locks long and full. His beard was silky, and unrestrained rather than unkempt. Near-sighted eyes, peering from behind the inevitable black-rimmed pince nez, or at times a monocle, seemed curious and inquiring, typifying perfectly the spirit of naïve interest with which he looked out on life to observe its myriad moods and forms. In this look there was something reflective, too, as though he had just noticed a matter of unusual interest, and was inwardly speculating upon its further meanings. The nose was pleasure-loving, though robust, dignified, and individual—counteracted upon by the satirical mouth, whose sarcasm, in turn, was gently toned by twinkling furrows that flanked his eyes. In later days the sharpness of Daudet’s expression of mouth had been almost lost, and a gentle detachment, betokening a just but sympathetic critical spirit, marked his countenance and made it less keen than lovable. Yet it was in those later years that his cherished hatred for the French Academy led to the bitter satirical outburst against that institution in his novel, The Immortal (1888). But that was only one phase temporarily dominant in the man whom everyone loved and who himself loved all.
Alphonse Daudet was—especially in youth—the exponent of the south, the south as typified by his native Provence. His was the rich, effusive, impressionable southland nature—abundantly moved upon by all the southern charm and vivacity and naïveté and life, as well as richly gifted in the ability to reproduce those impressions in the pages of his writings. Then what more natural than that he should both personally and in his fiction embody the vivid life of the carefree land? When, in 1869, his first important volume of collected stories appeared, it was seen that into Letters from My Mill—which included “The Pope’s Mule”—Daudet had poured not only the young unspoiled richness of his own buoyancy, but also the fulness of his feeling for local landscapes, traditions, and characters of town and country. And again and again, even in his later work, Daudet reverts to the scenes of his boyhood life, and gives us pictures—now jocund as the wine of the country, now sad as a poet’s wail—whose tone and spirit are of the Provençal life, all delicately set in the atmosphere of that sunny clime.
In the History of My Books, which forms an integral part of the author’s Thirty Years in Paris, he takes us by the hand in his dear, intimate way and shows us the great white house, the ancient and unique manor of Montauban. Near by, its shattered wings swaying in the wind on the summit of a little pine-clad mountain, stands Mon Moulin—the windmill about whose dusty portals for centuries had gathered the quaint characters of the district, and where, now that its traffic was forever departed, the young Alphonse first began to distinguish man from man in the stories told him by the ancients of the province.
“Excellent people, blessed house!” he writes. “How often have I repaired thither in the winter to recuperate in the embrace of nature, to heal myself of Paris and its fevers in the wholesome emanations of our little Provençal hills.”
The greetings of old friends at an end, he would whistle to Miracle, a venerable spaniel some fisherman had once found on a bit of wreckage at sea, and climb up to his mill, there to browse and dream and wander in fancy whithersoever the spirits of the place should beckon.
“The mill was a ruin,” he says; “a crumbling mass of stone, iron, and ancient boards which had not turned in the wind for many years, and which lay, with broken limbs, as useless as a poet, while all around on the hillside the miller’s trade prospered and ground and ground with all its wings. Strange affinities subsist between ourselves and inanimate objects. From the first day, that cast-off structure was dear to my heart; I loved it for its desolation, its road overgrown with weeds, those little grayish, fragrant mountain weeds with which Père Gaucher compounded his elixir; for its little worn platform where it was so pleasant to loiter, sheltered from the wind, while a rabbit hurried by, or a long snake, rustling among the leaves with crafty detours, hunted the field mice with which the ruin swarmed. With the creaking of the old building shaken by the north wind, the flapping of its wings like the rigging of a ship at sea, the mill stirred in my poor, restless, nomadic brain memories of journeys by sea, of landings at lighthouses and far-off islands; and the shivering swell all about completed the illusion. I know not whence I derived this taste for wild and desert places which has characterized me from my childhood, and which seems so inconsistent with the exuberance of my nature, unless it be at the same time the physical need of repairing by a fast from words, by abstinence from outcries and gestures, the terrible waste which the southerner makes of his whole being. Be that as it may, I owe a great deal to those places of refuge for the mind; and no one of them has been more salutary in its effect upon me than that old mill in Provence.”
Here, both in boyhood and in young manhood’s revisitations, Daudet found the “grasshopper’s library,” and in its secret alcoves discovered such delightful stories as “The Elixir of the Reverend Father Gaucher,” “The Three Low Masses,” “The Goat of Monsieur Seguin,” “Master Cornille’s Secret,” and “The Old Folks,” all abounding in naïve character and told with his own delicate charm. Here, too, he learned to take a delight in his craft which waned not with the years; and to find joy in pleasing “the people,” who were ever the subjects of his finest delineations.
Born at Nîmes in 1840, and as a mere lad leaving home for the city of Lyons, Daudet’s public career began with his journey to Paris in November, 1857. The boy of seventeen and a half came possessed of a slender collection of poems which, though the product of so youthful a rhymester, met with no little favor. In manner common to those who must win their way along the precarious paths of letters, he pressed on, until in 1859—he being not yet twenty—Daudet published his first volume of poems, Les Amoureuses, which won high praise from the critics, but is now sought chiefly by collectors. Thus he began to gain confidence, and others of his works followed almost yearly. The pages of Le Figaro were now freely opened to him, and that public by whom he never ceased to be loved began to scan its columns for his fantastic chronicles of Provençal life. In that same journal he began in 1866 to publish his Letters from My Mill, which were collected in volume form in 1869, and constituted his first real popular triumph.
The third period in our author’s life is marked by the sad experiences of the Siege of Paris, in 1870. Just as his life in the south inspired the Letters, so did the grave impressions made by those terrible days in the French capital during the Franco-Prussian War move him to write the little masterpieces which, in part, appeared in the volume entitled Monday Tales, published in 1873. Who that has read them can forget the “piercing pathos” of “The Last Class” and “The Siege of Berlin”? Not only are these human episodes of singularly tender appeal, but they are masterpieces of form, unsurpassed among short-stories of any language. As Daudet’s best work, they deserve further notice here.