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.