DATJDET, ALPHONSE (1840-97). The most graceful of modern French humorists. the most sympathetic satirist and the nnnsi min ing, if not the deftest, story-teller of his genera tion in France. Ile was a native of Provence. and inherited its warm imagination. lie has given us one of the (lassies of child autobiog raphy in his Le petit chose. His father, a well-to-do manufacturer. suffered a reverse of fortune. and young Daudet. who was already nursing literary dreams, was obliged to accept a post as usher, ill-fed and ill-paid. in a school at Alain. After a year of this mental slavery. he escaped in desperation and joined his equally penniless brother Ernest ( q.v.) in Paris (No vember, 1S57). He tried to eke out a liveli hood by journalism. contributing prose and verse to the Figaro of sound morale and polished workmanship. "His literary eonscience," says his brother, "awoke in him at the same instant as his literary talent." and it never slumbered, even when, as occasionally happened, the talent nodded. "It is style that perfumes a book." he said, and his own had a studied and unique fragrance from the first. Zola describes him at this time as "living on the Romance of the Ruse, a love allegory, on the outskirts of the city with other poets, a whole hand of joyous Bohemians," whom he was to picture in Jack. Yet he lived with them and left them without losing the bloom of his youth, the freshness of his mind, or the straightforwardness of his character. His work attracted notice, and in 1861 Empress Eng6nie, fascinated by his poem on Les Prunes, induced the Duc de Morny, the Minister of State, to give Daudet a sinecure secretaryship, which he held till Morny's death (1865) and turned to good account in Le nabob.
Holding this Government post, he traveled on nominal commissions to Algeria, Corsica. and Sardinia, gaining health and supplementing an always deficient sense of color while he gathered material for Arabian and Corsican stories, used in his Lett•es de mon moulin and Con tea do as well as for his greatest novels. Nunfa Ruume stun and Le nabab, and for the scenery of the first exploits of his immortal Tartarin. He now first learned to know Gambetta, Mistral, and others, from \Idiom he caught the secrets of Provencal character; he attempted the drama, and felt in 18115 sufficient confidence in his literary future to resign his Government position. In 1867 he finished Le petit chose and married an almost ideal helpmeet—a woman of letters, whose northern French common sense supple mented and directed his southern ardor, compel ling him, as it were, to realize the possibilities of Ins genius. Her influence was obvious in his next book, Lefties de mon moulin (1869). which contains some exquisite bits of sto•y-telling in lighter vein. Then came the war with Germany to give his mind a sterner temper. In that ter rible :t.ear (1870-71) it was that his genius came to full ripeness, which manifested itself first in Tartarin de Tarasron (1872). This, with its se quels, Tartarin .cur Ics _tiffs (1880) and Port Tara score (1 890) , is a masterpiece of subtle cari cature of the effervescent imagination of Pro• ence. that creates its own environment and yet charms in spite of its own self-deception. A sec ond volume of short stories, Contes in lundi (1873), fulfilled his promise of the Lettres de mon moulin and added a stronger note in such stories as La de•niire classy, Le sieve de Berlin, Le feu au billard, and Le bac. Less
admirable in tone are the Lettrcs d an absent (18,71), now canceled in Daudet's works, and Robert Delmont II S74), sketches of wartime, interesting because they contain preliminary studies for Jack and Le nabab. In 1874 Daudet entered on the high road to fortune as well as fame with his first 'Parisian drama,' the novel Fromont jeunc et Pist)• «intc. translated under the name of its feminine incarnation of evil. Sidonic. Here, as later. he showed himself an idealistic student of reality. choosing as his scene what he could view from his study window and gathering notes in street and shop and parlor. masses of which are among his literary rt mains. He had now found a new power and discovered the joy of sustained creative effort. Each novel now marks progress —Jack (1S76); Lc nabab (1877): Les rois en exil (1879) ; and uma Ron torsion (1881). Then conies a change in method with LYranyeliste (1S813), no longer a drama, but 'an observation,' a psychic study, a cauterization of cant and hypocrisy, not a novel of action. Sapho (1884), too, is more a demonstration than a narration, though some regard it, as did Daudet himself, as the crown of his achievement. It was the last novel written before nervous disease laid hold on him. It is a work of great power, but its realism verges on the pathologic, and its story of facile love, that saps the strength of heart and mind, is disagreeable reading. The novels of Daudet's decline are L'immortcl (1888), a satire on the French Academy, as inexplicable as it was cruel, with an imputation as improbable as it was unjust; Rose ct Ninclte (1891), a story of di vorce; La petite paroisse (1S95), a study of jealousy. His reminiscences are embodied in Trente ans de Paris (1885) and Souvenirs d'un 11001 me de jetties (1889). The posthumous Soutirn de famine. a bitterly sarcastic picture of French political life (1898), and a volume of stories, trivial or saturnine, La Fedor, also pub lished after Daudet's death, complete the list.
Since 1885 Daudet had been an intense ner vous sufferer, with alternating periods of great activity and dead calm. Death came suddenly at table in the family circle. Daudet had ex quisite subtlety rather than forceful virility. He charms by variety and suppleness, and by shifting of scenes and keys. He is more im pressionist than logician. He seldom shows more than one side, even of a complex character, and is better with women than men. But though he lacked interpretative insight, he had an acutely sensitive imagination, and was able to give of the society in which he lived the broadest. most varied, and, in the main, most faithful image, while he leaves on his readers the impression of a noble and sympathetic character. There are several translations of Daudet's chief novels and a uniform edition of them (Boston, 1900). with critical introductions. Consult: Leon Daudet, Alphonse Daudet, and Ernest Dau det. Mon Tricl et moi (Eng. trans. of them both, Boston, 1895) Brunetiere, Le roman natura lisle (Paris. 1896) ; Donmic, Portraits dYcri cains (id., 1S92).