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).
THE LAST CLASS
(La Dernière Classe)
The Story of a Little Alsatian
BY ALPHONSE DAUDET
Translation by The Editor