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 Alphonse Daudet.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO 
 
 3 1822 01666 0730 
 
 THE NOVELS, ROMANCES 
 AND WRITINGS OF 
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 MEMOIR 
 
 / 
 
 ^'Z ^eo-yi SPa.^ c/e^. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 THE ATHENAEUM SOCIETY
 
 Copyright, 1898, 
 By Little, Brown, and Company. 
 
 All rights reserved.
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 I dedicate this book, in all piety, to Madame 
 Alphonse Daudet, my dearly beloved mother — 
 my mother who discreetly aided and encouraged 
 her husband in all his good as well as wretched 
 hours and created about him that atmosphere 
 of tender reflection in which he was able to live, 
 work and die under the protection of a pure, 
 pensive and restful soul. 
 
 LEON DAUDET. 
 
 Paris, January, 1898.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 His tomb is hardly closed and I set myself to 
 write these words. I do it with a brave heart, but 
 broken by a frightful sorrow, for the one of whom 
 I shall speak was not only a father and husband 
 of the most exemplary sort, he was also my teacher, 
 my counsellor and my great friend. There was not 
 a line written by me which I did not read to him 
 while the ink was wet; there was not a thought of 
 mine, the true value of which I did not beg him 
 to state : there was not one of my feelings, the 
 power or the origin of which I concealed from 
 him. 
 
 This life which I owe to him, the beauty, 
 dignity and importance of which he caused me 
 every day to perceive ; this life, burning with 
 admiration for his intellectual and moral beauty ; 
 this Hfe which he scrupulously and jealously guided 
 and which he filled with pride at the example 
 offered by his own — I presented this Hfe to him as 
 it proceeded in order that he might judge and 
 strengthen it. 
 
 And now, although he, my darling one ! exists 
 no longer, as I march onward through this sor-
 
 viii Preface. 
 
 rowfully dark night toward him, the beacon, yet 
 do I persevere in my endeavor, guided by the 
 sound of his voice and the tender fire of his look. 
 
 My heart overflows ; I shall open it wide. So 
 many noble and grand things which he has said to 
 me tremble within me and seek an exit! I shall 
 permit them to be scattered before the feet of his 
 numberless admirers. The latter have nothing to 
 fear ; their gentle consoler was without a blot. If I 
 turn my eyes backward over the path of my exist- 
 ence, already harsh, though brief, I see him stand- 
 ing calm and smiHng despite his torments, showing 
 an indulgence which at certain critical hours has 
 thrown me trembling with admiration at his feet. 
 
 But it is not only for what he was in regard to 
 myself, or to my brother, my sister or my mother 
 that I love him ; it is also, and beyond everything 
 else, for his humanity which shone within him with 
 so profound and serene a splendor ; for his vast 
 and sympathetic comprehension of all kinds of 
 things and all sorts of people ! Surely seldom has 
 such a character been known here below and never 
 in a more splendid form. 
 
 I write for you, young people, and for you also, 
 old men, adults male or female, and for you by 
 preference, ye disinherited ones whom the world 
 repulses — vagabonds, luckless ones and the mis- 
 understood ! The extraordinary thing about this 
 writer was that he preferred the humble and the 
 disinherited of fortune to all others. It is with the 
 pale flowers of their lives that he wove his great
 
 Preface, ix 
 
 crown ; it was by relieving their distress with 
 words or with a discreet action that he closed the 
 circuit of hearts, and, as it were, created a new kind 
 of comprehension in his harsh day and generation. 
 
 Oh, most generous circulation of blood ! I have 
 never seen my father angry except when justice 
 was defrauded. He never swerved from justice 
 save when carried away by pity. And, to make an 
 ,end, his schooling was obtained through the pain 
 which he heroically supported for the love of his 
 family and the honor of human life. 
 
 Muddle notliing, ruin nothing, was his usual 
 motto, I draw inspiration from his tomb, but I 
 should not be the only one to benefit by his expe- 
 rience, I should not be the only one to direct his 
 life according to his example. I believe that I 
 am imitating him to-day when I draw aside the 
 dark veil which falls about a deathbed, permitting 
 that life-work only to shine with brilliancy. More- 
 over, that work emanated from him like his breath 
 and gesture. So, in order that you may know him 
 better, in order that you may love him more — I 
 mean all of you, big and little, whose unhappiness 
 he alleviated as by enchantment — I abandon to 
 you in part my filial privilege and am about to 
 allow those voices to be heard through which the 
 heredity and the paternal affection have spoken 
 that are the occupants of my respectful soul.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Cbaptkr Pass 
 
 I. Last Moments i 
 
 II. Life and Literature i6 
 
 III. As Father and as Husband — The Ven- 
 
 dor OF Happiness 89 
 
 IV. North and South 150 
 
 V. As a Man of Family 185 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 Concerning the Imagination. A Dialogue 
 
 between my Father and Me. . . . 201 
 
 THE DAUDET FAMILY. 
 
 My Brother and I 289
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET. 
 
 I. 
 
 LAST MOMENTS. 
 
 It is a fact that my father was ill for many long 
 years, but he supported his sufferings so bravely, 
 he accepted his restricted life with such a smiling 
 resignation, that we had come to the point — we, 
 meaning my mother, my brother and myself — 
 of divesting ourselves a little of the anxiety we all 
 felt at the time his sufferings began. 
 
 All the same, walking supported by one of us 
 and resting his weight on his silver-headed cane — 
 in regard to which he told our little sister and his 
 grandson so many marvellous legends — all the 
 same, with head erect and eyes bright and hand held 
 out toward the friend who visited him, he was the joy 
 and life of the house. This family which he cher- 
 ished and brightened with his most tender looks was 
 kept close about him ; he guarded it by that moral 
 force of his — immense, always in full power and 
 ever increasing as he lived. On all about him he 
 breathed an atmosphere of kindness and of con- 
 fidence which the coldest and most reserved could 
 not evade. 
 
 I
 
 2 Alphonse Daudct. 
 
 For the truth of this I call to witness the innu- 
 merable friends and literary comrades and strang- 
 ers who came to make the author a visit; without 
 exception they found him ready with counsel and 
 help, ready with those precious words which elicit 
 confidences and calm and heal the soul. 
 
 No one understood as he did the path to hearts. 
 He himself had had hardships in the beginning 
 and his extraordinary sensitiveness, which I shall 
 presently attempt to analyze, caused him to place 
 vividly before his own mind all the difficulties and 
 rebuffs and shames others might have met, and with 
 unexampled sharpness and vigor in particulars. 
 When a man stood before him with his face in a 
 strong light he divined him and summed him up 
 with a precision which was like magic ; but he was 
 chary of words and only used his eyes, so soft, 
 veiled and yet so penetrating ! " The look out of 
 his eyes warmed one " — that was the phrase 
 which I caught from so many lips during those 
 days of mourning ; and I admired the justice of 
 the expression. Moreover, confession — that balm 
 for souls which indignation or disdain has closely 
 imprisoned, that consolation of the afflicted, of the 
 abandoned and those in revolt — confession came 
 true and sincere from the hearts of the rudest 
 people ; yes, the ears of my beloved father have 
 had to hear strange avowals ! 
 
 I believe also that in him people divined a veri- 
 table ferment of indulgence ; his love of pardon 
 and of sacrifice belonged to his Catholic blood- 
 He believed that every crime could be forgiven
 
 Last Moments. 3 
 
 and that nothing was absolutely irreparable when 
 confronted by a sincere repentance. So many 
 luckless ones are captives of the evil which they 
 themselves have caused and only begin their 
 crimes over again through distress ! My father 
 had a final argument ; he pointed out to them 
 how he himself had been struck by illness in his 
 mid career, and how, by the force of his will, 
 he could offer himself now as an example. His 
 strength of argument was such that very few re- 
 sisted him. 
 
 And then, what an intimate eloquence was his ! 
 His words and his very intonations remain in my 
 memory quite intact. The tone was not the same 
 when he was telling some story in lively, splendid 
 and precise words, as when he took my sufferings 
 in hand. In the latter case he employed words 
 which were vague enough at first and rather mur- 
 mured than spoken, accompanied by gestures 
 gently persuasive. By little and little, and with 
 infinite precaution and delicacy, this speech be- 
 came more definite and connected ; it wove about 
 one's being a thousand little tangible and intangi- 
 ble bonds, a fine and delicate cobweb for the heart, 
 in which the heart very soon was beating warm. 
 That is the way he employed strategy ; but what I 
 cannot express in words was the spontaneity and 
 irresistible grace of his manoeuvres, half methodi- 
 cal, half inexplicable, the net result of which was 
 the solace of unhappiness. 
 
 He expected silence to do a great deal ; in this 
 silence the last words he had uttered vibrated and
 
 4 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 thus grew in grandeur. I can still see certain 
 people standing erect before his table with moist 
 eyes and trembling hands. I can see others seated, 
 turning toward him with a movement of thanks, 
 astonished by so much wisdom as his. I can see 
 the frightened ones and the stutterers, to whom he 
 knew how to give confidence by means of a smile. 
 Or else, while waiting for the result of his counsel, 
 he would pretend to look up a piece of paper or 
 his pen, his pipe or his eye-glass, somewhere about 
 his always cluttered table. 
 
 A depositary of so many confidences and se- 
 crets, my father kept them to himself; he has 
 carried them with him into his tomb ; very often I 
 guessed at certain things, but when I put him 
 questions, he gently evaded me and teased me for 
 my curiosity. 
 
 Far, far back, at the very beginning of my 
 youngest childhood, I can perceive the kindness 
 of my father. That kindness shows itself in 
 caresses, he draws me close to him, he tells me 
 wonderful stories, we walk together through the 
 streets of Paris and everything seems to have the 
 appearance of a festival. I perceive the warmth 
 of the sun and then another warmth, softer and 
 nearer to me, which is transmitted by the dear, 
 strong hand. In my narrow little breast I feel 
 something tangible and exquisite, for the sake 
 of which my breathing is quicker, something 
 which I have already learned to call happiness, 
 and as I walk along I repeat to myself / am very 
 happy to-day. My father talks to me ; for me he
 
 Last Moments. 5 
 
 has neither features nor face ; he is not a mar- 
 vellous man, but just simply my father. I often 
 call him Papa, Papa, just for the simple pleasure 
 which that word gives me, because attached to it 
 seem all the germs of brilliant and noteworthy ideas. 
 I ask him questions about everything around us, in 
 order to hear the sound of his voice, which appears 
 to me like the most beautiful music and seems to 
 sound in exact accord with the happiness and 
 brilhancy of all my hopes. 
 
 We pass through squares full of people and 
 enter grand mansions ; those who greet us are 
 jovial and Papa always makes them laugh. I am 
 wonderfully quick to perceive that there is some- 
 thing in him which is greater than that which exists 
 in others. They turn toward him, they address 
 themselves to him. 
 
 We are in the working-room, he, my mother, 
 and I ; at that time we inhabited the old Hotel 
 Lamoignon, 24 Pav6e Street in the Marais; this 
 time there is sunshine, too, in the shape of a big 
 yellow streak which lengthens the designs of the 
 carpet, a streak which I insist upon trying to polish 
 by rubbing it with my hand. My mother is seated 
 and writes ; my father also writes, but standing 
 up, using a little plank screwed to the wall. Now 
 and then he stops, turns about and puts a question 
 to my mother. From the way in which they look 
 at each other I divine that they are very happy. 
 Now and then he quits his place, strolls up and 
 down with long steps, repeating in a low tone 
 phrases which I know are his " work."
 
 6 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 These conversations of my father with himself 
 when he " plunges into work," form part of my 
 childhood's atmosphere. This expression of plung- 
 ing into work often makes me pensive, but the 
 most violent labor does not prevent him from rais- 
 ing me in his arms when he passes near me, or of 
 kissing me, or of standing me upright on an arm- 
 chair or on a table, — a dangerous but delightful 
 exercise, during which I feel perfect confidence 
 as to his strength. 
 
 Of all my comrades he it is who knows how to 
 play the best. In a corner we have a great mass 
 of paper balls, in order to have a snowball fight; 
 we have a corner of the drawing-room where two 
 armchairs placed together form an actual cabin, 
 in which we do not fear the attacks of savages and 
 where all the fruits of the Fortunate Isles grow in 
 abundance. When winter's cold groups us about 
 the fire, Robinson Crusoe's shelter is between the 
 thin knees of my father; as to the roof of the 
 cabin, that is his inevitable laprug which has been 
 known to take on the strangest forms and reach 
 the most unexpected destinations. The situation 
 in my mind is twofold ; I know perfectly well that 
 my father draws on his fancy and holds the thread 
 of the plot ; nevertheless I believe in my own rdle 
 and I inhabit with him a lonely country which a 
 very terrifying conflagration ever lights up. 
 
 Here is a painful matter: later, very much 
 later, it must be a year and a half ago, when I 
 had that typhoid fever and my father watched me 
 every night; my vague and floating brain revived
 
 Last Moments. 7 
 
 those distant remembrances. As in the case of 
 a weakened convalescent, my memory went back 
 to pluck these flowers of my extreme youth. I 
 trod again the pathway of the heaped-up years 
 and with an inexpressible tenderness looked upon 
 the handsome face of my belox-ed, turned toward 
 me under the rays of the lamp ; he did not seem 
 to be changed at all. ' 
 
 Often, as he recalled it to me later, were our 
 walks in the fields of Champrosay, roads given 
 over to filial love, roads of my heart ! At that 
 time I was hardly four years old and my father 
 held me by the hand. I had an idea that I was 
 leading him and constantly called out " Look out. 
 Papa, beware of the little stones ! " 
 
 Since that time, O Destiny, he has had need of 
 my grown man's arm ! We passed again over the 
 same paths, becoming gently melancholy the while. 
 VVe called back again those fragile hours in the 
 meadows and autumnal plains, the splendor of 
 which he would celebrate in familiar brief phrases, 
 and once more in the footpaths among the broom 
 and common herbs the past touched the present. 
 Our silence was filled with regret, for we had 
 formed the most beautiful dreams of trips together, 
 travels on foot yielding all the emotions and all 
 the surprises which my friend knew how to ex- 
 tract from the slightest episodes ; but his malady 
 made all these things impossible ! 
 
 " Do you know, Leon, under what guise the 
 roads appear to me? As escapes from my pain! 
 O, to flee away and disappear behind a bend of the
 
 8 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 road ! How beautiful they are, those long pink 
 turnpikes of France which 1 would have so liked 
 to tread with you and your brother ! " He raised 
 his black eyes with a great sigh, and I felt my love 
 for him augmented by an immense pity. 
 
 At the end of my childhood my father stands 
 before me proud and valiant and ready for his 
 growing fame. I know that he writes fine books, 
 for his friends compliment him about them, his big 
 friends whom I call the giants, who come to dine 
 in the house — M. Flaubert, M. de Goncourt ! I 
 am very fond of M. Flaubert; he kisses me with a 
 loud laugh. He speaks in a very high voice and 
 a very strong one, while he beats with his fists 
 upon the table. 
 
 When they are gone we talk about them with 
 admiration. 
 
 Then my education begins ; my father and 
 mother undertake it all ; I shall talk about this 
 later. At present simply a few recollections : 
 
 We are in the country in Provence at the house 
 of a friend. On a delightful morning filled with 
 fragrances and the hum of bees my companion 
 takes his copy of Virgil, his lap-rug and his short 
 pipe. We settle down on the brink of a river ; the 
 horizon, where lines of gold and rose are trem- 
 bling, is of a divine purity and is heightened by the 
 slender dark cypresses. My father explains the 
 Georgics to me. Thus does poetry show itself to 
 me ! All of a sudden, at a single stroke, the 
 beauty of the verses and the rhythm of the singing 
 voice and the harmony of the landscape — pane-
 
 Last Moments. 9 
 
 trate my heart. An immense beatitude invades 
 me, I feel myself ready to weep, and as he knows 
 what is passing within me, he draws me to his 
 breast, increases the charm and shares in my 
 enthusiasm ; I am fairly drunk with beauty. 
 
 This time it is the evening. I come back from 
 college after several courses in philosophy : with 
 incomparable power Burdeau, our master, has just 
 been analyzing Schopenhauer for us. Gloomy 
 images have torn my soul ; positively, in that 
 lecture I have eaten of the fruit of death and pain. 
 Through what disproportion of things have the 
 words of that sombre thinker completely con- 
 quered me and won such an actual power in my 
 impressionable brain? My father understands my 
 terror ; I hardly say a word to him, but he sees 
 something has been born within my look which 
 is too hard for a growing boy. Then he goes 
 about it. as before. He approaches me tenderly 
 and he who is already filled with sombre presages 
 about himself celebrates for my sake the glory of 
 life in unforgettable terms. 
 
 He talks of labor that ennobles everything; of 
 goodness radiating happiness ; of the sense of pity 
 which provides an asylum for the sad ; finally of 
 love, the only consoler for death, love, which I 
 only knew by name, but which was soon to be 
 revealed to me and was to overwhelm me with 
 happiness. How strong and pressing are his 
 words ! He makes a radiant picture of that life on 
 which I am embarking. Before his eloquence the 
 arguments of the philosopher fall one by one ; he
 
 lo Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 repulses triumphantly this first and decided attack 
 of metaphysics. 
 
 Do not smile, ye who read me ; to-day I under- 
 stand the importance of that little family drama. 
 Since that unforgettable evening I have gorged 
 myself with metaphysics and I know that in that 
 way a subtle poison has slipped into my brain as 
 into those of my contemporaries. It is not 
 through its pessimism that this philosophy is 
 perilous, but because it carries people aside from 
 life and overwhelms humanity in us. Bitterly do I 
 regret that I did not jot down the lecture my father 
 gave ; it would have been in many ways a great 
 comfort. 
 
 Thus I reach the final years, only stopping at 
 the brighter points of that life of filial piety on 
 which my whole being depends. If I speak of 
 myself, still it is always he round whom the matter 
 runs, because I was his field of trial — a field, alas, 
 very often ungrateful and without a harvest. 
 
 My father would have liked me to have entered 
 the literary career in the line of instruction. It 
 seemed to him that the finest of all duties was the 
 education of young minds to the point of under- 
 standing ideas, following them step by step, form- 
 ing in them a character and developing in them 
 the power of feeling. He admired all those in our 
 epoch who have, as he was wont to say " taken 
 charge of souls," and he showed a sympathy and 
 respect to my masters at Louis le Grand College 
 which most of them unquestionably will recall. 
 By what way and wherefore did destiny at first
 
 Last Moments. ii 
 
 drag me toward medicine? That is something of 
 which I shall speak in another place. His own 
 maladies and the visits of celebrated doctors 
 unquestionably had a good deal to do with it, so 
 impressionable is youth ! 
 
 But the v^ery day on which that career repulsed 
 me, the day I grew disgusted with the charnel 
 house, its examinations and its competitions, he 
 respected my evolution. My first literary essays, 
 which I read to him at the Baths of Lamalou, 
 were resolutely encouraged by him ; and from that 
 very moment, entering into the estate on which he 
 planted and caused to grow such magnificent trees, 
 I profited every day by his counsel and experience. 
 
 In the rare old copy of Montaigne that never 
 left him, which carries on its yellow and green 
 pages the traces of visits to many a noted thermal 
 bath — in this book wherein he found every kind 
 of instruction and every sort of comfort, I find 
 that famous chapter on The Resemblance of Chil- 
 dren to Their Fathers marked and annotated with 
 special care. Unquestionably, he had realized 
 for several years past that there had been roused 
 in me, and almost without my knowledge, that 
 strange literary demon from whom it is not possible 
 to escape. 
 
 When I confessed to him this new zeal which 
 had filled me, he gave me a fine lecture which I 
 remember perfectly. It took place in a vulgar and 
 bare hotel room ; by some unusual chance my 
 mother had been forced to stay in Paris with my 
 brother Lucien and my sister Edm6e who was
 
 12 Alphonse Datidet. 
 
 then very young. He spoke to me with a gravity 
 full of emotion, coming after his usual manner very 
 near to my heart and my intelligence. He repre- 
 sented to me the troubles of the profession of a 
 man-of-letters, in which no one has a right to be 
 an artist in the highest sense, because one remains 
 always responsible for those who, reading one's 
 books, might be troubled in mind thereby. He 
 did not conceal from me the many and varied dif- 
 ficulties which I would meet upon my way — even 
 admitting that success would favor me, " which is 
 very rare ! " To this he added some very simple 
 rules, but so true ! — rules for sincerity and effect in 
 style, the part played by observation and imagina- 
 tion, the building up of a work, its method, and 
 the relief to be given therein to the actors and 
 their temperaments. 
 
 I listened in a religious spirit. Well I under- 
 stood that he was pouring forth to me, there, the 
 accumulated result of his hard work and the finest 
 crystallization of his mind. At about that time 
 we were in the habit of reading Pascal of an even- 
 ing in a loud voice from chamber to chamber and 
 from bed to bed. He presented this sublime mas- 
 ter of style to me along with his beloved Mon- 
 taigne, not as if he were too lofty an example, but 
 like a constant stimulus. He also spoke to me of 
 his own sufferings, but in a manner almost like that 
 of a philosopher in order not to make me sad ; 
 and he insinuated that, for a number of souls who 
 have not expressed themselves, literature was a 
 solace and relief, such persons finding in it a
 
 Last Moments. 13 
 
 mirror and a guide. He showed me the near- 
 est examples in Flaubert and the de Goncourt 
 brothers. He closed with a eulogy upon life in all 
 its forms, even the most painful. 
 
 The light was failing, but still lit up his proud 
 and delicate face. Filled with a sort of holy con- 
 fidence, I traced his words back to their original 
 meaning, back to those deep motives concerning 
 which he was silent. Between us two there was 
 some happiness but a great deal of anxiety. As I 
 evoke them, I make them live again, decisive 
 hours that they were ! 
 
 From that day onward till his last hour he never 
 ceased to counsel and instruct and guide me ; we 
 got in the habit of such a way of talk that I was 
 able to translate his silences, so that a single word 
 from him was equivalent to long phrases. From 
 that time forth, without a variation or truce, he was 
 my impartial and tender critic. 
 
 During his last years the fear of losing him grew 
 upon me, but owing to that sorrowful privilege oi 
 mine it made me attentive to his slightest word 
 That has made it possible for me to write this 
 book. I lived as it were in a cave where shone a 
 perpetual flame ; our garden at Champrosay and 
 his working room are crammed with the memories 
 of conversations in which I limited myself to ques- 
 tions concerning all the great problems of human- 
 ity. I shall try to give some idea of his curt, 
 elliptical and picturesque language, which really 
 approached a human look, owing to its intensity, 
 rapidity and the crowding of images. Of a surety
 
 14 Alphonse Daudet, 
 
 the novelist was a power and the future will show 
 him to have been one still more ; but the man 
 behind the novelist had not his equal for the treas- 
 ures of experience and truth, which, like minted 
 money, he poured forth from dawn to night. 
 
 His friends knew his power of divination well ; 
 he analyzed the most distant and varied events 
 with an almost infallible acuteness. His rare mis- 
 takes became for him so many causes for new 
 observations of himself. His pitying, charitable 
 nature was lightened by playful and ironical phrases 
 in which tears seemed to mix with smiles. At our 
 family table in the presence of my grandmother, 
 whom he adored, his wife, whom he loved more 
 than anything else, his baby daughter and two 
 sons — at our delightful table which his departure 
 has left so empty and silent, he took as much 
 trouble in conversation as he would at a reunion of 
 his friends. 
 
 There indeed it was that death came to seize him 
 on the i6th of December, 1897. It was during din- 
 ner. I had come in somewhat late and found our 
 little family met together as was usual in his work- 
 ing-room. I gave him my arm into the dining- 
 room and seated him in his big armchair. Whilst 
 taking his soup, he began to converse ; neither in 
 his movements nor his way of acting was there any- 
 thing to announce such a disaster ; when, all of a 
 sudden, during a short and terrible silence, I heard 
 that frightful noise which one never forgets — a 
 veiled rattle in the throat followed by another rattle. 
 As my mother cried out we rushed toward him.
 
 Last Moments. 15 
 
 He had thrown his head backward ; that beautiful 
 head of his was already covered with an icy sweat 
 and his arms were hanging inert along his body. 
 
 With infinite precautions my brother and I lifted 
 him up and laid him on the carpet; in one second, 
 behold the horror of death fallen upon our un- 
 happy house ! Ah, the groans and lamentations 
 and all the useless prayers addressed to one who 
 had known how to give us everything, except just 
 one little bit more of himself! The doctors came 
 quickly. Dr. Potain, who loved him, tried every- 
 thing possible and impossible. O frightful and 
 heart-rending spectacle of the body which had 
 given life to us and from which life had fled in a 
 lightning flash ! So much kindness, gentleness and 
 beauty, so much sympathy, so many generous 
 enthusiasms, all are nothing more than a remem- 
 brance for us ! 
 
 An hour later, amid repressed sobs, he lies upon 
 his bed as beautiful in the motionless gleam of the 
 candles as his image in my heart. The bonds 
 which attach us to him shall be broken only by 
 our death, but now they are being lost in the 
 darkness. Our memories have become the tombs 
 where lie his motions and his words, his looks and 
 his tender deeds. Here below love will keep no 
 one from that path. Virtue keeps no one, genius 
 keeps no one back. But as, broken and despair- 
 ing, I bent over his most pure and lovely brow, it 
 seemed to me that I heard these words: "Be of 
 good cheer, the example remains ! "
 
 11. 
 
 LIFE AND LITERATURE. 
 
 My father never separated life from literature; 
 that was the secret of his influence. In his view 
 art was accomplishment. To create types of hu- 
 manity and free the souls of men, that before all 
 else is what he longed to do. 
 
 Many a time has he told me how his youth was 
 devoured by that same love of life and how it was 
 due to my mother, " his devoted, his sweet and 
 tireless comrade in work," that he did not fool- 
 ishly dissipate those gifts received from nature 
 which at a later moment he employed in such a 
 splendid way. He hardly thought of fame for a 
 moment and let the important question of the 
 future which awaits the works of dead men stand 
 aside unquestioned. 
 
 One day I read him a sentence by Lamartine 
 from the Coiirs de Litteratuve which struck him; 
 he asked me to repeat it, as he usually did when 
 sowing new seeds in his memory. The poet 
 speaks of " that marvellous shiver of sensibility, a 
 forecast of genius, if the genius do not come to 
 shipwreck from the passions." That shiver of sen- 
 sibility was considered by my father the source of 
 every work which was to last.
 
 Life and Literature. 
 
 17 
 
 In certain obituary articles, otherwise very well 
 meant, I have read this sentence, which has caused 
 me to smile : " Alphonse Daudet was not a thinker." 
 
 No, certainly he was not and never was a thinker 
 in pedantic fashion, a maker of abstractions and a 
 juggler with obscure phrases ; that he was not ! 
 
 But here on my table I have his books of notes 
 where, every day, without wearying and with an 
 incredible scrupulousness and patience, he wrote 
 down the incessant workings of his brain. Every 
 sort of thing is found here in these little books 
 bound in black moleskin, all their pages rumpled, 
 scratched and scribbled up and down and from side 
 to side. 
 
 At first one gets the impression of a tumult and 
 a buzzing, a kind of regular trembling. That fine 
 mind, I fancy, is completely awake in those notes, 
 awake with all its revulsions and whirlwind changes, 
 its comings and goings, its quick-dying flames and 
 its fiery spaces. 
 
 Then, after a great deal of attention, I pick out a 
 kind of rhythm, the harmonious movement of his 
 mind which had its origin in feeling; it multiplies 
 itself, inspires itself with picturesque views, visions 
 of travel, dreams and reminiscences, and traverses 
 those colored and rosy regions where the miracle 
 of art takes place ; where through the mystery of 
 birth a vivid impression becomes the starting-point 
 for a book or an essay. 
 
 Then the tone rises; it remains living and 
 clear, but becomes more precise and closely set; 
 phrases crammed with experience of the world
 
 1 8 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 appear placed side by side, without apparent 
 bonds. Nevertheless they appear to belong to- 
 gether like colors and brush strokes in some sketch 
 by Velasquez or Rembrandt, phrases which contain 
 a realism that is sometimes cruel and as if shudder- 
 ing with anguish and sincerity, phrases which, like 
 countenances modelled by the heart and the senses 
 of man, arouse innumerable reflections. 
 
 And in this abridged way and from this vibrat- 
 ing cohesion and out of this tissue of flesh and 
 nerves spring astonishing formulas, brilliant wit- 
 nesses to his own soul, in generalizations far 
 grander than those detached ideas of the human 
 mind in which metaphysics lose themselves. 
 
 To sum up in a word, this perpetual work of 
 analysis, done with a sincerity which reaches the 
 verge of crying aloud, reveals in the author's 
 thought a constant ascension and purification ; it 
 shows a zeal to carry the torch into the fogs and 
 cobwebby corners of the human spirit and it ex- 
 hibits, as it were, a patience pushed to the ideal 
 point. 
 
 There is more than passion alone, there is also 
 the spirit of sacrifice. Sometimes I used to say 
 laughingly to my father: "How you do derive 
 from the Catholic blood ! " At the last analysis 
 these notebooks reveal to us a soul in a complete 
 state of sensitiveness where without doubt dogma 
 has been obscured, but where religion has left its 
 imprint on whatsoever religion offers that is at 
 once touching and implacable. Me is certain to 
 examine himself without cessation. He is sure to
 
 Life and Literature . 19 
 
 write down without delay whatsoever people have 
 felt, whatsoever people have suffered. The joys 
 of life and of death, the slow crumbling of our 
 tissues, the unfolding of our hopes and disillusions 
 are a terror for the greater part of mankind ; but 
 the last and greatest terror is ourselves. This terror 
 it is, this secret need of paltering with our con- 
 science which makes somnambulists of us and 
 causes us to hesitate before the confession which 
 our heart makes to our heart through the long 
 silence of the nights and days, even as we carry on 
 our unseen and obscure existence ! 
 
 The most powerful souls remain children rocked 
 in the cradle of an ignorance which they voluntarily 
 render denser and deeper, an ignorance which they 
 keep tongueless and dark with shadows. 
 
 Montaigne, Pascal and Rousseau were the three 
 chief and violent admirations of my father. He 
 himself was a member of that mighty family. He 
 was never without his Montaigne. He annotated 
 Pascal and defended Rousseau against the honor- 
 able reproaches of those who are ashamed of 
 shameful deeds and turn aside in disgust from 
 things of the flesh. Without a moment's rest he 
 entered into the abodes of these powerful mod- 
 els, wandered through their, crypts and pondered 
 over those redoubtable silences which lie between 
 their confessions. He took to himself one of their 
 thoughts and lived with it as with a lady-love, or 
 some forgotten sister whose resemblances and dis- 
 similar traits he was examining — all with that 
 scrupulous earnestness which he brought to bear
 
 20 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 upon matters of feeling. He put questions to 
 the people about him, or to those who are on the 
 wing, and even to the facts which happen every day. 
 He loved the sincerity of those three geniuses, so 
 ripe and so vast and so big. He proposed them 
 as examples for himself He was thoroughly satu- 
 rated with their substance through having con- 
 versed with them so long. Was not that the work 
 of a thinker? 
 
 Well, of all the great books that lie open, that 
 one which he studied more than any other was the 
 book of life. Impressionable as we know him to 
 be, his youthful days must have been extraordina- 
 rily crowded with sensations and things of all kinds 
 that 'attack the nerves, things which he was able 
 to classify in his old age. But here is one of his 
 most surprising characteristics : maturity did not 
 show itself in his case either as a drying-up or a 
 stoppage of development ; to the very end of his 
 life, and only through suffering, he preserved intact 
 the faculty of being moved. 
 
 In our talks we used to compare that precious 
 and most rare faculty to a constant sore on the 
 spot through which force circulates, flooding over 
 from the human being to nature and rising from 
 nature to the human being. I remember that he 
 likened it to the wound given by the Holy Spear 
 that pierced the side of Christ. 
 
 " Listen," said he to me one day, " listen to one 
 of my visions ! Our Lord hangs on the cross ; it is 
 dawn, a cold and biting dawn. There is the martyr 
 so in love with life that he is willing to lose it after
 
 Life and Literature. 21 
 
 it has poured forth upon every one its charity and 
 redemption, and toward the Master are rising the 
 sounds of the city which is awaking to a new day — 
 sounds and odors from perfumes and from kitchen 
 hearths, noises of mighty crowds ; and then, much 
 nearer, the groans and long lamentations at the foot 
 of the cross. He drinks this all in through every 
 pore and the taste of the vinegar becomes less 
 bitter whilst the torture of the nails, of the cruci- 
 fixion and of the lance wound becomes less 
 keen. ..." 
 
 He went no farther, but he laid a certain weight 
 upon the last words, so that I might follow him on 
 to the sequel. He did not insist upon particulars 
 in these beautiful dreams, but left the care of com- 
 pleting them to his listener, knowing that he who 
 adds a little of himself understands better than if 
 he be told all. 
 
 This delicacy of feeling, often so acute that it 
 reached the point of the inexpressible, remained 
 perfectly straightforward notwithstanding, and never 
 attacked the right and proper rule. That rule, 
 which was perfectly simple and lucid, remained in 
 him as a boundary not to be transcended. My 
 father detested the " perversity " of certain minds, 
 those unwholesome games played with the con-, 
 science in which it has pleased certain remarkable 
 men to indulge. 
 
 This delicacy of feeling was alway on the alert. 
 In his little note-books he talks of the hours with- 
 out grace, in which the priest finds that his faith 
 has left him, or in v/hich the lover, horrified by the
 
 22 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 discovery, questions himself concerning the depth 
 of his love. One of his preoccupations was never 
 to harden himself in pain, but to remain accessible 
 to all the emotions. For my part I have never 
 known him to have any hours " without grace." 
 
 In telHng a story he had a way which belonged 
 to him alone, one his friends will never forget, 
 nor indeed others who merely heard him once. 
 The description followed close upon his memory 
 of the affair and adapted itself to it like a wet 
 garment. In their proper order he reproduced 
 the facts and sensations necessary to the story, 
 suppressing the intermediate ones and leaving, as 
 he was wont to say, only " the dominant ones." 
 
 " The dominant ones " — that word was always 
 on his lips. By that he understood the essential 
 and indispensable parts, the pinnacles of the book 
 or the novel. " It is on these points," he used to 
 add, " that it is necessary to let the light 
 play." 
 
 He used also to repeat: "Things have a sense 
 and a side by which they can be grasped," and in 
 that vague term " things " he understood what is 
 animate as well as what is inanimate, whatever 
 moves and expresses itself, as well as whatever 
 agitates or weighs itself. 
 
 In that way we penetrate the secret of his simple 
 method which at first blush seems by no means 
 simple and indeed is one which demands in a 
 writer those natural gifts that were his. 
 
 A lover of real things and of truth, he never 
 ceased that search of his. As long as he was able
 
 Life and Literature. 23 
 
 to leave the house he went about in the greatest 
 variety of places, never neglecting a chance and 
 particularly never despising any human being. 
 Most remarkable was it how he detested disdain 
 as one of the forms of ignorance. Whether the 
 person in question was a clubman in the drawing- 
 room, or an artist, or a sick man, whether it was a 
 pauper on the turnpike, or a forester, or a passer- 
 by, or some workman met by chance, my father 
 took advantage of his own prodigious turn for 
 sociability or of his charmingly delicate kindness 
 in order to break through that vulgar region where 
 only hypocrisies are exchanged, thus penetrating 
 to the soul of the person. 
 
 He inspired in people that extraordinary con- 
 fidence which springs from the delight of being 
 understood and is doubled in pleasure by compas- 
 sion ; and that compassion was not a role assumed 
 for effect. I have seen very different kinds of 
 people surrender their confidence to him with 
 rapture. How many people suffer from recoil ! 
 How many people feel themselves quite alone 
 upon the earth, finding everywhere nothing but 
 misfortune ! 
 
 I have used the word method ; it has a false 
 sound when applied to activity like his which is so 
 human. Before everything else my father followed 
 his own inclination, which was that of loving his 
 neighbor and sorrowing and rejoicing with him. 
 My mother, my brother and myself indulged in 
 tender pleasantries over the wrath which boiled 
 up in him on hearing of some act of injustice, or
 
 24 Alphonse DaucCet. 
 
 over the personal interest which he took in affairs 
 as far as possible separated from him. 
 
 When a cruel malady drew limits to his earlier 
 modes of life — limits in a certain way less griev- 
 ous, it is true, than people have stated — he opened 
 his portals wide. He welcomed all misfortunes 
 and listened patiently to the recital of every kind 
 of distress. Never did one hear him complain of 
 having his work interrupted in order to soothe an 
 actual pain. Very few people duped or abused his 
 confidence, for he knew how to uncover lies with 
 extraordinary sagacity ; but even that did not 
 irritate him: "The poor wretch," he often said to 
 us with his delightful smile, " the poor wretch 
 thought that he was deceiving me ; but I read 
 falsehood on his face and divined it from the trem- 
 bling of a little muscle down there in the corner of 
 the mouth which I know very well ; it was made 
 known to me also by the ' winkiness ' of his eyes ; 
 there was a moment when I was on the point of 
 betraying myself Pshaw ! he 's an unhappy crea- 
 ture all the same." 
 
 When the man was gone he would note down 
 whatever in the conversation seemed to him pecu- 
 liar and worthy of memory. And his memory, 
 besides, was infinite, for, notwithstanding his bad 
 sight, he could recall a name, a figure, a gesture, 
 an odd habitual motion or a form of speech after 
 several years had gone by. He suddenly asked 
 one of his old fellow pupils of Lyons College, whom 
 he had not seen for thirty years. 
 
 " Why, you still have it there on the nail of your
 
 Life and Literature. 25 
 
 thumb, I do believe ! That Httle blood-red mark 
 that used to astonish me when you wrote ! " 
 
 His most vivid recollections comprised one of 
 the emotions of the past which he reconstructed 
 for us with complete fidelity to fact. I still have 
 ringing in my ears an account of a conflagration in 
 which the flames were still crackling, and through 
 which the outlines of firemen and half-nude women 
 ran helter-skelter. He appeared on the scene of 
 the combat pouring water himself and having 
 water poured on him, holding a lance in his hand. 
 He had attained the age of ten years ! " Stay 
 there, boy ! " one of the life-savers said to him. He 
 did stay there until the flames came and burned ofl" 
 his eyelashes and licked at his hands. And he had 
 never forgotten the cries, or the cracking of beams, 
 or the flares of light, or the terror on the counten- 
 ances, or his own particular emotion mixed with 
 joy. And how he did tell us all that ! With what 
 exact and striking strokes of the brush ! 
 
 Another time it was an inundation from a sudden 
 freshet in the Rhone, with the strokes like a batter- 
 ing ram in the cellars delivered by the running 
 water; this he recalled, adding detail to detail, 
 while his thought turned back to the past. Then 
 the crashing boats and that very boat on which he 
 stood, and the drunken feeling of danger he had ; 
 then the people invaded by the flood, perched in 
 clusters on the roofs of houses, and again, the 
 moaning gulfs and whirlpools, the irresistible qual- 
 ity of the waters. 
 
 The peculiarity of a mind like his is this : it
 
 26 Alphonsf Daudet. 
 
 makes a sort of tapestry out of so many different 
 kinds of images, groups everything and classifies 
 everything unconsciously through the slow labor of 
 perfection. From the natural tendency of images 
 to come together, through that movement of im- 
 pressions which have been received, which brings 
 them into contact the one with the other, it thus 
 forms the complete bundle of impressions. The 
 peculiarity of a mind of that kind is that it makes 
 use of the slightest touches in its incessant labor 
 in order to compare things, deduce and amplify 
 them without deforming them, just as naturally as 
 the heart beats and the lungs inhale. 
 
 Take the works of the great writers. Note with 
 care the dominant points ; it will be very surprising 
 if you do not notice two or three fixed and well 
 defined pictures among the most varied and rich 
 descriptions ; they return periodically but they are 
 painted in new colors. Among the wealth of char- 
 acters created by Balzac, Goethe or Dickens or 
 Tolstoy, there are certain primordial turns of char- 
 acter, certain basic elements in nature which are 
 central and marking points. Life has given them 
 into the hand of genius. Genius has returned them 
 to life while decking them with all its own prestige. 
 
 Thus it was with my father. I can well remem- 
 ber his astonishment when, having begged his 
 friend Gustave Toudouze to make a selection from 
 his works in which only examples of materialistic 
 love should be found, the latter pointed out in the 
 long line of his novels and dramas a constant return 
 to the motive of " the mother," who is herself the
 
 Life and Literature. 27 
 
 sum and entirety of human tenderness. Without 
 his knowing it, the figure of her who conceives us, 
 bears, nourishes and educates us, suffers with our 
 sufferings and becomes radiant with our own hap- 
 piness, and ceaselessly sacrifices herself for us, 
 that admirable and spotless figure had taken pos- 
 session of him. In his eyes she was the grandest 
 and deepest problem of the heart, and, without his 
 having noticed it, this problem had ever harassed 
 him under all its forms. 
 
 He attached an enormous value to the emotions 
 which open up our lives. " There is a period," he 
 cried, "when one \^2iS finished printing. After that 
 come the second editions." And often I have 
 found him occupied by this other thought, subsid- 
 iary to the last: "In the human being there is a 
 centre, a nucleus which never changes and never 
 takes on wrinkles ; whence our astonishment at 
 the swift flight of the years and the functional and 
 physical modifications that befall us." 
 
 When one of these statements caught hold of 
 him he was not satisfied with a formula, however 
 clear-cut and well-defined. In the first place a 
 formula scared him. He saw in a formula the 
 image of death, he wished to nourish it with exam- 
 ples. He believed that on the day when the for- 
 mula would no longer apply directly to life it 
 would lose its sincerity and become a dead leaf. 
 " Humanity," that is the grand word which includes 
 all those tendencies which I am now piously un- 
 ravelling here, a word full of blood and nerves, 
 which was the motto of my tender friend.
 
 28 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 During those last years we often went out to- 
 gether. As long as he was able to choose his 
 carriage at the station, it was always the most for- 
 bidding and dilapidated he took, a carriage which 
 he thought nobody else would accept. I remem- 
 ber a very old coachman, driving with great diffi- 
 culty a very old horse and seated on the tottering 
 box of one of those fantastic cabs such as one may 
 find waiting for the night trains. My father had 
 adopted this wretched team as his own and as 
 soon as we turned the corner of Bellechasse Street 
 we were sure to see it jogging toward us. On his 
 part the old fellow had fallen in love with this easy- 
 going customer, who never found fault with his 
 slowness and his lack of cleanliness. One of the 
 last times that we took him, before he went to 
 complete wreck among the shadows of Paris, what 
 did he think of but a plan of writing large, in big 
 red letters, on the panels and on th£ glasses of the 
 cab, the initials A. D., thus calling attention and 
 announcing himself as the property of the person 
 who had taken compassion upon him ! 
 
 A crowd of Httle reminiscences of this sort fly 
 about my heart. I do not hesitate to jot some of 
 them down, so that when you read his great books, 
 dripping with emotion and sweetness, you may 
 know that they were the fruit of a sincere soul, as 
 splendid in his slighter movements as in his long 
 and patient efforts. 
 
 Naturally our outings were but little varied. We 
 caused ourselves to be driven along the Champs- 
 Elysees as far as the Arc de Triomphe. My father
 
 Life and Literature. 29 
 
 loved that splendid sloping way, which recalled to 
 him so many memories, recollections that I fol- 
 lowed in his expressive eyes, eyes always turned 
 toward the picturesque, seizing upon and defining 
 humanity with a fabulous quickness. If he felt 
 himself more than usually melancholy, we went to 
 Bethune Quay, where the history of Paris vibrates 
 from the ancient stones as they warm beneath a 
 pale autumnal sun. 
 
 Beloved sun, how my father did adore you ! 
 Though meagre and pale, that sun recalled to him 
 his balmy Provence, the very name of which would 
 cause his face to change and would bring back 
 color to his pallid cheek. " Primeval joy: to cook 
 one's back in the sun ! " ' Oh, for a good cagnard^ 
 down there toward the Durance ! " he would sa}% 
 resting gently on my arm and looking into the 
 whirling water of the Seine. Whereupon, as if 
 given wings by his dream, he would start off on his 
 voyage toward one of those mirages which 
 made a perpetual enchantment of his slightest 
 conversation. 
 
 It might start with some trivial remark : a ray 
 of light on the forged iron of a balcony, a pane of 
 glass lit with the sun, a reflection flung up from 
 the river. Stimulated by some nice parallel — 
 and no one loved exact nicety so much — he 
 would squeeze my arm a little and his imagination 
 would rouse itself. The merely picturesque tired 
 him quickly. It was necessary that something 
 
 1 A little shelter from the wind made of reeds in which to lie 
 and sun oneself.
 
 30 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 human should intervene. All he needed was a 
 half-opened shutter to cause him to picture the 
 entire interior with the poetical decision of the old 
 masters of Holland. It might be an anxious old 
 woman's outline, an old man drinking in his last 
 sip of sunlight, or some mark of tenderness in the 
 people — childhood or decrepitude; he divined 
 their meaning, combined and evoked their story, 
 glad at his own discoveries ; and so ever with a 
 gay and easy air he scattered abroad his energy 
 and verbal treasures: "We are still playing 
 Robinson Crusoe, my boy," said he, "just as we 
 did in the old times under the lap-rug. Every one 
 of these good people is living on his own narrow 
 island, very zealous indeed on the subject of his 
 nourishment and the satisfaction of his interests ! " 
 
 During a terrible summer's heat on that very 
 Bethune Quay we saw a workman stripped to the 
 waist who was laughing under the spout of a 
 watering-cart which was being vigorously played 
 upon him. That powerful torso, that masculine 
 attitude, those swollen muscles, his powerful short 
 neck and erect head, these formed a departing point 
 for a magical improvisation. How he gloried in the 
 robustness and simplicity of the man ! What 
 splendid things he said concerning sculpture and 
 muscles played upon by the sun, concerning sweat 
 and water, the caryatids carved by Puget, and that 
 antique vision which appeared round the corner of 
 a Parisian street ! 
 
 There ! I can see his quick and generous smile, 
 I can hear his laugh. For, notwithstanding his
 
 Life and Literature. 31 
 
 sufiferings, he preserved his gayety and took 
 advantage of the sHghtest respite ; fun sprang 
 spontaneously and irresistibly from a character so 
 in love with nature, so ready to seize upon amus- 
 ing thoughts at the very moment that they were 
 making him sad. We never knew one of his rare 
 fits of wrath which could not be disarmed by a 
 droll turn of words. Then it was delightful to see 
 how his severe face changed, how he yielded with 
 delight, only too glad to return to the usual 
 sweetness of his nature. 
 
 It was when he happened to be with his old 
 friend Frederic Mistral, whom he loved and 
 cherished, it was at that charming table of his 
 where genius sat enthroned, or else it was at the 
 house of the Parrocels, likewise in Provence, that 
 I have seen him oftenest the cause and starting- 
 point of tumultuous fun. His inherited race char- 
 acteristics, his surroundings and contact with his 
 compatriots roused in him vivid, unexpected, im- 
 promptu dramatic power. He imitated the differ- 
 ent accents in the dialects between Valence and 
 Marseilles, the very attitudes and gestures of the 
 people. He gave us the benefit of the two voices 
 in the same narrator — that voice which claims all 
 the advantages, counsels, lays down the law and 
 defines things, as well as that voice which starts 
 contradictions, stutters and goes all to pieces. 
 
 He gave us the worthy citizen, the " Cato in 
 very low relief," the sententious man, libidinous 
 and longfaced, whom the boarding-school teachers 
 fear. He played the politician with dishevelled
 
 32 Alphonse Daudet, 
 
 hair, slipping in the vehemence of his speech into 
 the most dangerous metaphors. Then we would 
 get " dear old Father Oily," or the godly woman 
 confessing herself in the confessional box and the 
 same woman cursing a station master : or, again, a 
 customs officer, a servant, a child who clamors 
 for his orange, the crowd collected at a bull- 
 fight. 
 
 In one of our first trips down South we were in 
 a waiting room of the tavern while the rain fell 
 without; the presence of his dear friends Aubanel, 
 Mistral and Felix Gras who were drinking with us 
 and the giddy joy of "showing them ofif" to his 
 wife, his Parisian girl, roused in him memories of 
 his most turbulent youth. The round table of 
 poets grew wildly excited. There were songs 
 from the countryside, old Christmas waits in which 
 tears were mixed with smiles, rich ballads from 
 lies d'Or and passionate cries from the Grenade 
 Entr' ozwerte . The correct and warm voice of my 
 father dominated the noise and showed me its 
 beauty by its rhythm. Enthusiasm was seen on 
 every face; the real sun of Provence was shining 
 there in that tavern ! 
 
 It is that frantic fun, it is that flashing of gayety 
 which make Tartarin and Roumcstan such rare 
 and charming books, true products of the soil, 
 warm and savory, juicy and brilliant. But the fine 
 characteristics in my father's nature sparkled all 
 through his life before they came to ornament his 
 books. When I open one of them I hear his sweet 
 and quiet accent ; how is it possible to separate
 
 Life and Literature. 33 
 
 that memory from the part which the future will 
 find to admire in him? 
 
 As a matter of fact his celebrated irony was 
 really the fine flower of his tenderness. By means 
 of that irony he escaped from the commonplace 
 and avoided the bitterness of comparisons. By 
 means of it he brushed artifice aside. Gifted with 
 so spontaneous a talent, he escaped vulgar 
 comedy ; endowed with a sensitiveness which was 
 sharp and even cruel, he softened its effect with 
 smiles and appeased its acridity with those twists 
 and turns which leave the soul of the reader trem- 
 bling and impressed, instead of overwhelmed with 
 gall. 
 
 This irony, purely Latin in its genius, has been 
 compared to the sarcasm of Henri Heine. Such 
 parallels are almost always false. Heine was an 
 exquisite poet but an exile and a nomad, having 
 no connection with his own soil and suffering from 
 the fact that he could not find a surrounding 
 nature. He makes the whole world responsible 
 for his disquiet. Hardly has he excited emotion, 
 when he puts us to the rout with a bitter grin. He 
 sneers at our hearts and at his own heart. Gifted 
 with a nature of marvellous harmony, he throws all 
 his sensations into disorder, and when one ap- 
 proaches him to sympathize, he escapes from us 
 with a grimace. My father knew well the beaten 
 footpaths of his own friendships. 
 
 He used to speak of a ballad from the north of 
 France in which a woman who sees her husband 
 again after a long absence begins to weep. This 
 
 3
 
 34 Alphonse Dmidet. 
 
 same ballad in its Southern version makes her keep 
 herself from smiling. In that little allegory he was 
 defining his own character. 
 
 In his little note-books I read a reproach ad- 
 dressed to the husband who relates to his young 
 wife all the love adventures of his past: "Idiot, 
 you '11 find out later " is the end of the note. 
 Under that simple form, behold the irony. It is a 
 mask for pity. The picture in Jack of the men 
 have " missed fire," the supper of the Old Guard 
 in Sappho and one page or other of L Immortel , 
 are further examples of that tendency he had 
 to move his readers by taking the slant road, if 
 the direct path seemed too much trodden. That 
 is the resource for a warm heart which has a cer- 
 tain bashfuiness with regard to over-vivid and too- 
 apparent sensations. 
 
 In this manner the author of Femmes d' Artistes 
 and of Tartarin, of Le Nabab and of V Immortel 
 rose to the height of lofty satire, which is nothing 
 else but an inverted lyricism and constitutes the 
 revenge of generous souls. Irritated and wounded, 
 the poet causes the brazen string to vibrate ; but 
 there is never anything too harsh, even amid the 
 most bitter assaults ! " Implacability," that word 
 made him ponder. Every fault seemed to him 
 capable of correction and every vice capable of 
 remedy; he sought for some excuse for every 
 crime. I have found the finest arguments in favor 
 of human liberty and of the resources offered by 
 the moral world in that same life of his, so simple 
 and open to the day.
 
 Life and Literature. 35 
 
 The man who has been reproached in so silly a 
 way for never having given forth metaphysical 
 ideas seemed to me on the contrary ever troubled 
 with those great problems of the world within us, 
 which are now the mirage of inspiration and now 
 the mainspring of our actions. 
 
 Among philosophers he admired Descartes and 
 Spinoza, as much for their lucidity of mind as for 
 their minute and anxious researches into the play 
 of human passions. If his love of life drew back 
 before the extra-terrestrial form of those mathe- 
 matical formulas applied to flesh and spirit; if he 
 preferred Montaigne's method, he also loved, as he 
 said, to " inhale a breath upon the lofty heights " 
 of Spinoza's Ethics. He often said that it would 
 have been singularly interesting if some Claude 
 Bernard should annotate these commentaries on 
 the movements of the soul. 
 
 For Schopenhauer he had a very pronounced 
 taste. That combination of incisive humor and 
 power of dialectics, that tissue woven of the black- 
 est arguments and picturesque aphorisms delighted 
 him. I read aloud long extracts from Schopen- 
 hauer; having taken them thoroughly in, he pon- 
 dered over these readings, and took them up 
 again on the morrow, enriching them with subtle 
 remarks. 
 
 We used to talk everywhere and at all times. 
 He delighted in shutting himself up with me in his 
 dressing room ; I can see him now interrupting 
 himself to discuss a point, a comb or a brush in his 
 hand, and then, when our ideas began to get into
 
 36 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 a fog, thrusting his head down into the basin '* in 
 order to clear up our ideas." " My boy, the 
 action of fresh water on the brain in the morning 
 is a grand problem all of itself! The man who, 
 having made a night of it, has not washed himself 
 or made his toilet, is capable of performing the 
 most frightful follies, and is incapable of the mean- 
 est train of argument." 
 
 Incidentally I have spoken of his conscientious- 
 ness. He returned always to the same subject 
 without ostentation and without dulness, as long 
 as anything which was obscure remained. He 
 would not take words for coin, " Sellers of 
 phrases " — that is what he called those hard- 
 skulled reasoners who would like to run the moral 
 world by mathematics and in accordance with 
 fixed laws. "I do detest the automatic point 
 of view ! " he would also cry, when considering 
 some icy and involved analysis ; and as to this 
 " automatic point of view " he showed how it 
 killed off every kind of frankness and all original 
 impulse, down to the simple happiness that comes 
 from creation. 
 
 Suffering, which is so relaxing and persuasive, 
 has periodical phases. The song of the nightingale 
 is capable of inspiring in us disgust for a delicate 
 machine. What poetry there is in the fall of the 
 leaves, the retardation of waters as they turn to 
 ice, if at the same time one thinks of the alterna- 
 tion of the seasons ! 
 
 Unless I am mistaken, metaphysics themselves, 
 having finally taken up the consideration of the
 
 Life and Literature, 37 
 
 feelings, will take account in the near future of 
 those very arguments which arc called reasoning 
 from feeling, which so profoundly correspond with 
 our need of liberty for the mind. Unless I am 
 mistaken, the grand philosophical system that we 
 shall have to-morrow will put emotion in the first 
 rank and will subordinate all else to it. 
 
 Possessed of an absolutely honest intellectual 
 process and ever a prey to constant scruples, my 
 father never hesitated to acknowledge himself igno- 
 rant of anything: "I do not know — Why, I did 
 not know that ! " His eye would brighten at once. 
 Filled with the delight of learning, he would forget 
 other people and busy himself only with that per- 
 son who could bring to him a novel point of view 
 or a story full of useful results. 
 
 His knowledge was vast and accurate. More- 
 over he surprised me sometimes, when our talk 
 fell upon some scientific or social subject, by the 
 truth of his information and the largeness of his 
 views. He read enormously and with method, 
 and assimilated difficult questions to his mind 
 with marvellous quickness. He demonstrated the 
 strength and the weakness of an argument and 
 called attention to the paradox. His love of truth 
 was of use to him there as always, since it freed him 
 from prejudice and refreshed his logical strength. 
 Long-winded theories bothered him: " Let us get' 
 forward to the picture." I can see the movement 
 of his hand sweeping aside mere words. 
 
 He had a real and abiding love for Latin and 
 Greek. Because he admired education, he made
 
 38 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 of education one of the grand mainsprings of 
 humanity and was up in arms against the new 
 pedagogues who try to restrict the study of dead 
 languages : 
 
 " Certain men and women," cried he, " who pos- 
 sess the innate gift of style, have instinctively the 
 taste and the tact to choose the words which 
 they employ. A woman of that kind was the 
 much-to-be-admired Sevign^. But that sort of 
 mind is a great exception. Most people get from 
 classical study a benefit v/hich nothing else can 
 replace. The mind which feels the beauty of 
 Tacitus, Lucretius or Virgil is very near being 
 that of a writer." 
 
 Tacitus was always to be found upon his table 
 by the side of Montaigne. He read from him a 
 little at a time, only a page or two, and then trans- 
 lated him after a style which I have found in very 
 few masters. Besides, he had already shown a 
 proof of his cleverness in that line by his transla- 
 tion into French of the admirable Provencal prose 
 of Baptiste Bonnet. And as far as the Annals 
 are concerned, I have seen him for hours at a time 
 feverishly hunting for a faithful and correct expres- 
 sion, as anxious to fulfil the poetic rights of the ear 
 as those of the mind. 
 
 Difficulties delighted him. How often, whilst I 
 was making my studies, when too arid and close a 
 text had brought me to a stop, did I leave the 
 book on his table of an evening ; the next morn- 
 ing early I would find it there with the French 
 translation opposite. My professors complimented
 
 Life and Literature. 39 
 
 me and gave out my work as examples to the class. 
 At the general competitions for rhetoric I remem- 
 ber a sentence which had shipwrecked the strong- 
 est of us. The line has remained in my memory, 
 it is such a model of a Chinese puzzle. 
 
 " Ut cortina sonet celeri distincta meatu." 
 
 My father took the accursed page, and, whilst he 
 walked once round the garden, translated it for 
 me without hesitating into words quite as strong, 
 robust and brilliant as those of the author; and he 
 added, in order to console me : 
 
 " Certain pages, and those by no means the 
 least beautiful, of my dear de Goncourt will cer- 
 tainly prove as difficult for the college boys to 
 come as that line is." 
 
 He broke me into my Latin by reading the 
 verses or fragments of examples in prose with 
 which Montaigne interlarded his Essays: 
 
 " As for us people of the South, the classic 
 phrase has never died out amongst us. Just look 
 at this Gascon of the sixteenth century ! He de- 
 lights in manuscripts ever opened and reopened. 
 Parchments preserved in monasteries and libraries 
 have the authority of oracles to him, of messages 
 from the past. He clothes his modern arguments 
 in toga and buskins. He grafts the sibylline leaves 
 upon his thick-leaved tree. The ' Renaissance,' 
 my dear boy — have you ever comprehended the 
 entire meaning of that splendid word? It is Pan 
 the Great restored to life. Rising from out old 
 dusty scrolls, a tremendous shudder ran through
 
 40 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 souls alive with beauty. ' Why, then, let Gascon 
 words fill the gap,' said Montaigne, ' if French will 
 not do ! ' But there was Latin also and Greek 
 besides. ' Let beauty show, let plainness hide its 
 head,' as our own Mistral sings. 
 
 " Don't you see him, that happy Michel who 
 shows us Michel himself and recognizes in him the 
 nature of all men, don't you see him in his library, 
 trembling with enthusiasm before the grandeur of 
 nature, gesticulating, like the regular Southerner 
 he is, at the memory of some line from Lucretius 
 which delights him and corroborates his thought? 
 Antiquity pulses through his heart. Thirst for 
 learning consumes him. And over everything else 
 stands the necessity of expansiveness, of telling all 
 about himself, which is so active in modern char- 
 acters as they are still found among us." 
 
 Such bits of talk as this have remained in my 
 intellectual treasury. Alas, I have just perceived 
 that there is lacking to it the warm Southern 
 accent, the " monster " itself And, as happens in 
 meetings constantly renewed, we were apt to return 
 to the same subjects ; but each time my father 
 added something. Until the day of his death his 
 life was a perpetual seeking. 
 
 Some few friends are able to recall the memory 
 of a page from Rabelais read aloud by him. He 
 had found a good many bushes and fronds and 
 flowers from the South in that forest of Gargantua 
 and of Pantagruel. The author's long stay at 
 Montpellier explains these reminiscences in Rabe- 
 lais. At the end of his own copy my father has
 
 Life and Literature. 41 
 
 noted down the chief localisms ; naturally they 
 greatly stirred his lively soul. He mimicked for 
 us the entire tempest scene or else the adventures 
 of Gargantua, booming up his voice to the diapa- 
 son of frenzy, laughing at himself at the same 
 time, throwing back his hair, sticking his eyeglass 
 into his eye, fairly drunk with the power of words 
 the while. 
 
 Another day it would be Diderot whom he 
 would take up and celebrate by declaiming his 
 most brilliant pages, the most vibrating of those 
 in Ceci n\st pas un conic, Maintes lettrcs a Made- 
 moiselle Volland, or else Lc Ncveu de Ranteau. At 
 another time it would be Chateaubriand, in whom 
 he admired his long deep breath and his rhythm 
 like the tremendous swing of billows. In his verses 
 he pointed out that epic tone which is applied to 
 familiar reminiscences, that splendor of a soul 
 which never weakens, though always melancholy 
 and as it were draped in the classic folds of mourn- 
 ing for its lost illusions. 
 
 I would have to pass the entire French literature 
 in review in order to cite the literary gods my 
 father adored and invoked, from whom in his 
 sorrowful hours he demanded comfort. O the 
 miracles wrought by poetry ! Our friend and 
 parent is wrapped in gloom ; he is suffering. We 
 hesitate to speak to him, knowing too well what 
 his answer will be. All of a sudden a name or a 
 quotation uttered by one of us brings life back to 
 his look, as if it were the coming of a friend or a 
 well-known air of music. In a moment he asks
 
 42 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 what is going on and is all excitement. He must 
 have the book and the page ! Lucien or I run 
 to the library. Oftener it is my mother who takes 
 the trouble, because she has a clear and soft voice 
 and never hurries. Here are the Confessions or 
 the Memoires d' Outrc-Tombe. At the first words 
 uttered my father is no longer the same man. He 
 approves and degustates, his head inclined forward 
 in the attitude of meditation as he stuffs his little 
 English pipe. He interrupts. He asks us to go 
 on again. He questions the author and discusses 
 a matter with him. Enthusiasm has driven out 
 suffering and moroseness and started up again the 
 fires of youth. 
 
 Now it is our turn to listen, and the hours pass 
 as in a dream, and those magnificent phrases of 
 a past generation live once more a pallid life at the 
 touch of a wand from a magician such as he was. 
 So, across the ages, do those who love and seek out 
 beauty begin their lives anew. 
 
 Since the love of research is universal in a mind 
 of that kind, I would hardly know how to tell its 
 depth and width. The misfortune of a study of 
 this sort is that of necessity one is limited. One 
 of the virtues in the model I have before me was 
 exactly that continuity of his, his harmoniousness, 
 or, if one may so express it, the architecture of his 
 joys and sorrows. So it was that, being a connois- 
 seur of words and always surrounded by dictiona- 
 ries of the first class, such as that compiled by 
 Mistral, he loved to examine the debris and 
 metamorphoses of a word. Thence derive his
 
 Life and Literature. 43 
 
 exactness and the beautiful clearness of his 
 style. 
 
 Every one of those noble feelings was a guide and 
 torch to his feet. He judged of a word by his ear 
 which in him possessed delicacy and a supreme 
 wisdom ; and by his eye, because in spite of his 
 short sight, he was a seer. He weighed the word 
 and rolled it on his tongue like a connoisseur; for 
 there is more than one noun which will evoke an 
 entire period for us, more than one adjective whose 
 historical importance is greater than that of a 
 manuscript or a suit of armor. 
 
 He avoided the exceptional and precious, know- 
 ing well that there is often a rare quality in some 
 word of seemingly common appearance ; he left its 
 true meaning to every term, being an enemy of the 
 torturing of language, because he understood its 
 structure so well. It is one of the follies of our 
 time to believe that limpid transparency cannot 
 exist along with depth. There are rivers whose 
 pebbly bottoms gleam as if they lay just beneath 
 the surface — but a giant may drown himself 
 therein ! 
 
 He reiterated : " I hate monsters ! " The con- 
 versations of Eckermann and Goethe which for a 
 long time were his breviary (for he changed his 
 intellectual loves and only showed a continuous 
 fidelity to Montaigne) are confirmation of several 
 stages in that thought. My father sided with 
 Goethe, whose motto " Reality and Poetiy " seemed 
 to him to sum up the wisdom of mankind. He 
 was also wont to say : " Nothing in excess ! " and
 
 44 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 in truth sanity of mind and a hatred of that too- 
 much, which one finds unfortunately among most 
 Southerners, were brought to their highest expres- 
 sion in him. 
 
 " On Goethe's side against Jean-Paul " — how 
 often have we not held discussions concerning 
 tendencies. " Art " was one objection he made 
 " is not merely the expression of one's own char- 
 acter; the man who does not drive the monsters 
 out of his own soul is very soon devoured by 
 them." 
 
 When we were discussing this question we would, 
 often glide quickly to composition and the architec- 
 ture of a work, to which he accorded capital impor- 
 tance ; according to him it was the condition of its 
 durability: "Every book is an organism. If its 
 organs are not in place, it must die and its corpse 
 become a nuisance." 
 
 And since he had given great thought to the 
 putting of order and rule into his novels and 
 dramas, he also wished to make his interior and 
 outward life harmonious. For this work a great 
 mass of knowledge and of studies seemed to him 
 necessary. 
 
 In his librafy, beside all the great masters, the 
 stories of life and adventure were found on the 
 main shelves. He stated that the love he bore for 
 men of action had been developed in his case by 
 the necessity of a sedentary life : " I accomplish 
 through imagination whatever my body does not 
 allow me to do." 
 
 He knew in detail all the campaigns of his hero
 
 Life and Literature 45 
 
 Napoleon and the journeys of his other hero Stan- 
 ley, as well as expeditions to the North Pole. When 
 people talked to him of the nineteenth century, so 
 restless and full of tumult and perhaps more covered 
 with incomplete monuments than any other, he 
 defined it with two names : " Hamlet and Bona- 
 parte; one the prince, not only of Denmark, but of 
 the life of man within; the other, a source of the 
 grandest deeds and of the entire gamut of gesticu- 
 lation." 
 
 As for Stanley, he did not boggle at comparing 
 him to the victor of Austerlitz. The works of this 
 distinguished man never left him. He read them 
 on, without wearying. During a recent touch of 
 typhoid fever which befell me and which I shall 
 have reason to mention often as one of the lumin- 
 ous summits of paternal tenderness, when I was 
 lying inert for hours with scarcely a bit of memory 
 or intelligence remaining, he tried to bring my 
 wandering faculties back by reading to me some 
 pages from Through Darkest Africa, or from 
 Five Years on the Congo. He sat close to my 
 bed toward the end of day on one of those sultry 
 days near the close of May which are so trouble- 
 some to a convalescent. He held the big book in 
 his weak hands; he wanted to carry me far, far 
 away (using the remedy which was a solace to his 
 own sufferings) in the wake of the intrepid trav- 
 eller, overwhelmed by a much heavier fever than 
 mine, through that land of dangerous plants, and 
 beneath the shadowy dome of leaves. 
 
 " His only hope was in his companions, Jephson,
 
 46 Alphonse Daudet 
 
 whom you saw at our house, a brave boy with 
 ruddy cheeks, and that dehghtful Dr. Clark. And 
 notwithstanding his delirium he retained his feeling 
 of responsibility. He remained the chief in the 
 midst of all his sufferings. What an extraordinary 
 reservoir of energy ! 
 
 Every Thursday he explained to our guests that 
 Stanley was not a cruel man, as envious people 
 have insinuated, but that on the contrary he was 
 the most humane and least ferocious of conquerors ; 
 that he was as just as he was firm. 
 
 In London, during a journey which to-day is 
 precious for its slightest episode, where we met the 
 man whom he so much venerated, when he had 
 him beside him on a little low sofa it was one of 
 the most touching spectacles in the world to see 
 the affectionate relationship of two souls which 
 understood one another so well. I state again : 
 the man for whom my father had such a real and 
 tangible friendship is not a bad man ; in him one 
 may admire one of the finest types of the Anglo- 
 Saxon race, but one who belongs to all the races 
 through the discovery of a continent, through a 
 lucidity of mind equal to his courage and a clear 
 and unhypocritical judgment. 
 
 At the time of that very jaunt abroad which made 
 it possible for my father to understand England, he 
 also had the delight of visiting " Hamlet" at the 
 same time that he met " Napoleon." I allude to 
 George Meredith, that extraordinary novelist whose 
 fame is brilliant on the heights, on the very noblest 
 summits of the mind, and will come down some
 
 Life and Literature 47 
 
 day to delight the crowd whenever the torches take 
 up the march. What a dehghtful visit to that 
 green country about Box-Hill all decked with trees 
 and waters, where the author of The Egoist and 
 Modern Love and of twenty masterpieces wel- 
 comed at one and the same time his comrade in 
 letters and the family of that comrade with a tender 
 and spontaneous charm ! 
 
 How I cherished you that day, O master of the 
 bitterest thought, of the most robust and liberal 
 thought ! I understood you to the verge of tears ! 
 What things passed that day between the looks 
 you gave forth and those that emanated from your 
 brother in intellect ! What hours worthy of you 
 and of your power of analysis were passed in that 
 cottage where lights and shades played about your 
 aureole. O, vast and subtle heart, and friend of the 
 French to the point of having defended them in 
 1 870 with a piece of verse unique in its generosity! 
 You are the genius whose brain devours him and 
 who with a subtle smile rails upon evil ! Hamlet? 
 yes, you were Hamlet for Alphonse Daudet and his 
 following, a mirror as it were of Shakespeare on that 
 spring afternoon when nature herself became mor- 
 al, when the black pine-trees were trembling like 
 so many human bodies, when the lawns themselves 
 seemed to have the softness of human flesh ! 
 
 Above and beyond love there is another love 
 and it was that you gave as a gift to your comrade, 
 a man as ardent as you are for life and just as 
 yearning for beauty. I ponder over you in these 
 sombre hours as a holder of those secrets which
 
 48 Alphonse Daudet 
 
 people who arc detached from this world hug to 
 their breasts, or as those raisers of ghosts who 
 pursue phantom shades. The image of your mag- 
 nificent and pure features shall never be separated 
 from the one for whom I weep because they have 
 lost their perishable shape. 
 
 As far as Napoleon Bonaparte is concerned, one 
 man satisfied the passion that my father felt for 
 him, namely, our friend Frederic Masson. For 
 many years he clamored for those books in which 
 the life of his military god was followed day by 
 day, in which the author unravelled the motives, 
 the character and the adventures of Napoleon. 
 When Masson's books appeared he could not 
 leave them ; he boasted of their worth to every 
 person who came in ; he declared that the task 
 which he himself had so often dreamed was now 
 accomplished, — namely, to reconstitute the man 
 in his completeness, further the love of him and 
 rouse the whole race. The author of that final 
 and definitive work will hardly deny the statement 
 if I affirm that he met with the greatest encourage- 
 ments in his " dear Daudet." 
 
 He was not only in love with the heroes of 
 action, my father also celebrated the lives of the 
 obscure and devoted ones, those who were sacri- 
 ficed to glory ; from Rossel " a reversed Bona- 
 parte," "a starless one " whose name returns more 
 than fifty times in the little note-books, down to 
 the bold hero of Port-Breton, down to Blanqui 
 whom Gustave Gefifroy has made famous, down to 
 Rimbaud the prodigious and the Marquis de
 
 Life and Literature. 49 
 
 Mort;s — in fact all those who nourished tremen- 
 dous plans, men, as he often repeated, following 
 the striking formula of Baudelaire, for whom action 
 " has never been the sister of their imagination." 
 
 His shelves were filled with a multitude of pam 
 phlets referring to the works and deeds of these 
 knights-errant, these men of imagination, these 
 deserters from an existence according to the code, 
 who risked their lives without hope of return, 
 railed at and tempted destiny, throwing their 
 bodies as food to the ravpns and the future, men 
 who opened up new paths and disdained death. 
 " That scorn of death which makes man invin 
 cible " — he placed that above everything. He was 
 tremendously interested in the Trappists, whom 
 he had visited in Algiers, and in the Foreign Le- 
 gion and in the fits of desire for revolution and 
 in outbursts of unemployed energy seen among 
 those boiling courages which are confined with- 
 out enough breathable air by our false-faced soci- 
 ety, courages which are lamed by the tight boots 
 of the law. 
 
 Enthusiasm of this sort brought in play two 
 sides of his nature, his taste for risks and his love 
 for humble folk. For weeks at a time he was 
 haunted by the defence of Tuyen-Quan by Domine 
 and Bobillot. His fantastic faculty of turning him- 
 self into others, which I shall examine in detail, 
 permitted him to take on himself the role of every 
 one and follow his blunders and weaknesses and 
 recoveries. " You who love philosophy so, why 
 don't you make two monographs, one on Scruple 
 
 4
 
 50 Alpho7ise Daudet. 
 
 and the other on Risk, and show the -points where 
 they meet? Give powerful examples, don't fear 
 to lay it on thick ! Your old father will supply 
 you with the images." 
 
 On my return from a trip to the Alpine Club a 
 month before his death I told him that I had made 
 the acquaintance of Capt. Camps, one of the defen- 
 ders of Tuyen-Quan; his delight was endless: " I 
 am sure you did not know how to make him talk ! 
 What did they eat? When did they sleep? The 
 cries of the Chinese during the night ! And the 
 battles following one another ! Tell me, tell me ! " 
 Alas, I have not his power of glancing through a 
 man as through a book. 
 
 That last expression always delighted him, for 
 it justified his method ; one of his last happinesses 
 was the dedication to Grosclaude at the beginning 
 of the book on Madagascar. " Grosclaude, a 
 Parisian, a witty talker, and a subtle artist. He is 
 all energy and does not know his own powers. O 
 the admirable French race ! " 
 
 The war of 1870 was a revelation to him; it 
 made a man of him. He realized this one evening 
 when on guard in the snow ; at the same time he 
 had his first attack of pain and of remorse for the 
 indolence which permitted him to sing and write 
 light verses and current prose without a serious or 
 durable life-work. He adored all military trap- 
 pings; the music of regimental bands set him 
 aglow " like a colonel's horse ; " an officer's title 
 opened wide his door and his heart: "Those 
 who have formally made a sacrifice of their life
 
 Life and Literature. 51 
 
 stand on a higher plane than all other people." 
 One of the few questions in which he would admit 
 of no alternative view was the question of patriot- 
 ism. I intend some day to tell in a pamphlet, a 
 special pamphlet furnished with documents, what 
 his conduct was during the Terrible Year ; accord- 
 ing to him that year was marked by not only a 
 change in himself, but a complete metamorphosis 
 of the nation — customs, prejudices and culture. 
 
 If I spoke well of a German, he lauded the liter- 
 ature of Germany and murmured in a melancholy 
 way " Oh, our little fellows in their defeat ! " He 
 felt more keenly than anybody the disorder shown 
 in everything during that tragic epoch. Owing 
 to our lack of reminiscences he desired that my 
 brother and I should be exactly informed, so he 
 surrounded himself with all the French and foreign 
 works which speak of the Franco-German war. 
 During our sojourn at Champrosay this very sum- 
 mer he related to us in detail his impressions and 
 his anguish ; in a way it was his patriotic last will ; 
 he desired that the account of the defence at 
 Chateaudun should belread and re-read in the com- 
 mon schools. 
 
 His powers of persuasion were such that he 
 fashioned me after his own mind, and I saw that he 
 was happy therein. I beheve that he loved his 
 sons as much as anybody, but without a shadow 
 of hesitation he would have devoted us to the flag. 
 I made it a reproach to him to have never put in 
 black and white that analysis of our disasters 
 which he alone was capable of writing; but he
 
 52 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 shook his head : " One cannot elevate souls by 
 such a story ; for a warlike country like our own 
 it is necessary to sound the clarions of victory." 
 
 One admirable thing about him — this man who 
 had done his entire duty always modestly held his 
 tongue about it; but the wound never healed. 
 When Madame Adam came to see him the talk fell 
 naturally enough upon revenge ; my dear patroness 
 and he were not afraid of anything. He was 
 proud to learn that our army on the first line 
 seemed absolutely ready ; " I have never doubted 
 the right intentions of any one. Our governors are 
 in error when they accept humiliations. And yet, 
 after all is said . . . who knows ? . . . There 's the 
 grand mystery. . . . Where is the leader? ..." 
 
 I can say that his last days were darkened by 
 the Dreyfus affair. " I saw Bazaine," he repeated, 
 anguish in his face, " I saw Fort Montrouge after 
 the treason, the distress and sad horror of the 
 brave men who caused themselves to be killed next 
 day." Eager as he was in favor of justice, anxious 
 as he was that every creature should have his 
 rights and clever as he was^o unravel the threads 
 of intrigue, he could never reconcile himself to the 
 idea that a nation might be disorganized intention- 
 ally, certainly not without immediate and striking 
 proofs. The man who sells his own country 
 seemed to him unworthy of any pity whatever. 
 On the morning of the catastrophe I promised him 
 that Rochefort would come in person to confirm 
 him in his certainty. The idea of the visit de- 
 lighted him, because he much admired the great
 
 Life and Literature. 53 
 
 pamphleteer and recognized in him a unique gift 
 of observation analogous to the divining power of 
 Drumont. 
 
 " Unquestionably that comes from his long exile. 
 He looks at and judges things from afar, but he 
 has scented the needs of our interests." 
 
 He had that power of scenting things out, him- 
 self, although he disdained the actual politics of 
 social clowns and phrasemongers. His opinion 
 on this question is expressed in a chapter of his 
 last novel Soiitien de Famille : "It is through 
 the lobbies of the Chamber of Deputies that the 
 blood of France is being lost." But what irritated 
 him more than anything else was the bad faith 
 shown by parties and their universal hypocrisy. 
 
 No one better than he has described " the plat- 
 form effects and gestures and rhetoric of second- 
 class actors," all that macaronic verbiage which 
 makes up the conjugation of the word "to govern." 
 If there ever was a man in the world who loved the 
 populace with a real and unaffected love, it was he, 
 I recall our walks in Paris on the first national fes- 
 tivals of the 14th of July (we were then living in 
 the Marais), his happiness at the sight of the ban- 
 ners and women in their Sunday clothes and 
 radiant men carrying their boys on their shoulders. 
 He fraternized with everybody, offered people 
 drinks, extolled the good looks of the children 
 *' whom his long hair caused to laugh." " Do you 
 see that gown?" said one of them, " for a month 
 now father has been talking about it with mother ; 
 they have cut into the money for the household
 
 54 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 and quarrelled with the old parents ; you may just 
 believe it is a big thing!" 
 
 He was touched by their round-eyed looks of 
 greed before the shop fronts. He emptied his 
 purse in buying toys ; the value of the gift was 
 increased a hundredfold by the adroitness of its 
 presentation and by his charm. 
 
 One of his dreams was to write an anecdotal 
 history of the Commune, all the more impartial 
 because he made excuses for the madness of that 
 day : " I partook of that madness " said he ; "I 
 left Paris when they wanted to put me in the ranks 
 and when the crazy leaders exasperated me. I 
 reached Versailles ; but there again I found, in an 
 inverted way, once more the same cruel delirium, 
 the same injustice, the same eyes of hate — but 
 without the excuse of misery and hunger. I under- 
 stood then that, at the risk of death, it would be 
 necessary to hold oneself apart from each one of 
 those camps." 
 
 During those terrible years how often did we 
 have ourselves taken to the outskirts of the city ! 
 He was excited by the movement of the crowd of 
 an evening toward Belleville, by the sparkling eat- 
 ing houses, the push-carts, the quick succession of 
 faces and of attitudes of people at work. One of 
 his most perfect satisfactions consisted in that 
 popular edition, of his works which his friend and 
 former school comrade Fayard made an actuality. 
 He trembled with delight while turning over the 
 leaves of the little pamphlets for two sous apiece, 
 which placed his works within reach of those com-
 
 Life and Literature. 55 
 
 mon folk whose wretchedness he understood so 
 well. 
 
 Just here I wish to insist upon one of the finest 
 qualities in my father. Though favored by suc- 
 cess he never sought it in a vulgar fashion ; " big 
 editions " surprised him, but did not turn his head. 
 I have never known any one who disdained money 
 as much as he. Extremely and uncommonly plain 
 in his daily life, an enemy of luxury and show, 
 touchingly simple in his dress, his household and 
 his manners, he considered wealth the most dan- 
 gerous trap so far as morals are concerned, a well 
 of corruption at which he who drinks poisons him- 
 self, and the usual cause for the breaking up of 
 families and for hatreds among relations and in 
 society. 
 
 " The infamy of gold ; " it was described and 
 foretold by Balzac the sublime, whose literary 
 work, constantly overheated and overstrained, ap- 
 pears to me as the poem of Covetousness. It is 
 true that he has not made use of either gnomes or 
 giants as Wagner has in order to express the 
 power of the precious metal ; but he shows none 
 the less its legendary force when he generalizes 
 the tortures and shames and infamies that spring 
 from it, when he makes special mention of the 
 faces and grimaces, noting those words which are 
 sharply defined and carved upon the live flesh. 
 " Gold cannot give any of the radical happinesses, 
 those which are primordial and true ; no, not one ! 
 On the contrary it controverts nature, carves wrin- 
 kles and digs bogs ; it tears to pieces and corrupts,
 
 56 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 Economists state that gold circulates — yes, like 
 alcohol and opium, making the one it may inspire 
 cowardly or crazy, bringing him whom it raises up 
 low in the mire, heaping itself up only in order 
 to bring ruin, and accumulating itself only in the 
 interest of vice. 
 
 " Power and interest, and how they trouble 
 human passions — that is the Hell of the Magician 
 to whom we owe so many masterpieces. As if it 
 were an alcohol distilled from gold, it makes us 
 drunk, drowning out heart and brain, 
 
 " Whenever I pass by some magnificent mansion, 
 a residence or castle, a park with gleaming waters, 
 I ask myself what sorrow and what unhappiness all 
 that may conceal." He believed that in literature 
 a quick success and money are bad things, leading 
 the artist aside from his true path, which is to per- 
 fect himself according to his individual nature in 
 response to his own conscience, without any pros- 
 pect of pecuniary gain. 
 
 But this is what preoccupied him before every- 
 thing else : the author's responsibility. " Our 
 period is playing in a terrible manner with the 
 forces of print, which are worse than explosives." 
 One day I discovered in one of his Httle note- 
 books a list of the social injustices, the principal 
 wrongs which should be fought against. " I drew 
 it up," he confessed to me, " with an idea to supply 
 subjects for books. Now if there is one thing 
 which is consoling, it is that over against every 
 wrong there rises up a feeble — true, a very feeble, 
 attempt at reparation. Now it is a threat, now a
 
 Life ajid Literature. ' 57 
 
 simple outcry. Notwithstanding the universality 
 of egotism, there are ears for the greater part of 
 scandals which grow too great. Unfortunately 
 pitying humanity is possessed of narrow resources 
 and cannot be present everywhere at the same 
 time." 
 
 Then he came back to the policy of " phrase- 
 mongers," who, instead of taking up their time 
 solely in making social wrongs less severe, interest 
 themselves in nothing except the ballot-box. 
 " Some one little improvement every day " — that 
 ought to be their motto ! But little do they 
 occupy themselves with such works ! 
 
 So you may easily guess that he was a liberal 
 and indeed the most liberal of minds, although 
 still ever attached to 'tradition. But a parliament- 
 ary label would have been just as insupportable to 
 him as a literary label. Only he did show indigna- 
 tion when people accused him of having smutched 
 the memory of his former patron, the Due de 
 Morny : " I had no connection at all with public 
 affairs, I simply occupied a sinecure as a man of 
 letters. I am certain that I never wrote one line 
 in Le Nabab which could have been disliked by 
 the duke during his lifetime." 
 
 As a matter of fact Le Nabab is a historical 
 novel without coarse colors and without invective. 
 The outline of Mora is drawn with discretion and 
 no little grandeur. When he dealt with him, my 
 father always represented that statesman with all 
 his elegant and sinuous grace, respecting in him 
 the " connoisseur of men." " At that period I was
 
 58 Alpkojtse Daudet. 
 
 quite as careless and fantastic of brain as the 
 greater part of my contemporaries. Though it was 
 merely a suspicion of the terrible and grim things 
 which were preparing, I had nothing more than a 
 poet's shudder when listening to La Belle HHhie 
 in which the insulted gods of Olympus and the 
 shrill sound of Offenbach's violin bow seemed to 
 me a forecast of the catastrophe. 
 
 " But what catastrophe? I did not know. Yet 
 I went back to my room troubled and anxious, as 
 one feels when leaving some unwholesome atmos- 
 phere. A few months later I understood." 
 
 I have heard many conversations concerning 
 those most significant times. The most striking 
 were talks with Auguste Brachet, author of 
 Vltalie quon voit etl'Italie qii on ne voit pas, one 
 of those men for whom my father felt the very 
 liveliest esteem. " I may be able to see individ- 
 uals and discern the motives for their action, but 
 Brachet judges the masses, nations and national 
 events with an untivalled sagacity. Listen atten- 
 tively to him and profit by him ! You have before 
 you one of the finest brains of modern times ! " 
 
 I did listen, and profited. This took place at the 
 Lamalou Baths where Brachet was taking the 
 waters for neuralgic pains. The two friends were 
 never apart. The links in the chain of memories 
 were evoked one after the other. Those were 
 wonderful hours ! The author of L Italie, which 
 was a prophetic work in its way and roused so 
 many hatreds, had in preparation a great work, 
 which ought to be near publication, on the Com-
 
 Life and Literature. 59 
 
 parative Psychology of the Europeans. He " talked" 
 the main chapters in our presence with a glow 
 like that of Diderot, with a lucidity, power and 
 erudition that dazzled us. He was a teacher 
 of the Empress Eugenie and " showed up " the 
 Tuileries and society, the actors and their surround- 
 ings in sharpest relief after the manner of Hogarth. 
 
 I hope that from all these details, which are often 
 difficult to classify, the reader extracts this clear 
 idea — that Alphonse Daudet wrote his books with 
 the very sap of the human tree. 
 
 A form of foolishness one constantly meets is 
 to compare realism to photography. Every 
 organism has its own angle of refraction which is 
 much more complicated than that of an objective 
 glass ; my father's organism was one of the most 
 delicate and most impressionable materials in 
 which the outer world could possibly refract itself. 
 
 His ear had a delicacy and correctness most 
 exquisite. At a dinner-table with twenty present 
 he could make out conversations though they were 
 held in a low voice. He caught even the silly talk 
 of children. The slightest noises in nature im- 
 pressed themselves upon him and delighted him. 
 Thence came his passion for music which was 
 made an aid and assistance to his labors. 
 
 He sits at his table in his working room. My 
 mother is at the piano in the next room and the 
 music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann or Schu- 
 bert follows, one after the other, and excites or 
 calms the imagination of the writer. " Music is 
 another planet." " I adore all music, the com-
 
 6o Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 monest as well as the loftiest." But no man could 
 analyze and understand better the masters of 
 harmony, no man lauded the genius of Wagner in 
 more splendid terms or more brilliant images : 
 "The conquest by Wagner and the philosophers." 
 
 When he went to a concert his eyes were wet 
 with tears, so lively was his emotion. I could feel 
 him trembling from head to foot. His auditory 
 memory had no limits. With what a delicate 
 and penetrating voice did he not hum the airs of 
 his own country and of all countries! 
 
 Beautiful lines made more beautiful by sounds 
 induced in him a gentle melanchol}^. In former 
 years Raoul Pugno, Bizet, Massenet, men whom 
 he admired and cherished, and during the later 
 years Hahn, were real enchanters for him. The 
 melodies by his " little Hahn " which he caused to 
 be played three times in succession — Hahn, so 
 precocious in genius, so learned and so free from 
 pettiness, so lucid and gently sensual — positively 
 put him m an ecstasy. Seated in his big arm- 
 chair he half closed his eyes while his nervous 
 hand clasped the knob of his cane; his half- 
 opened lips seemed to drink in the sound. 
 
 I perceive him farther back in my memory at 
 the Exposition of 1878, listening to the gypsies, 
 a glass of Tokay before him, encouraging the 
 cries of "bravo" that resounded in their honor 
 and quite carried away by the music ! Then it is 
 Venice. The lapping of the water, the sound of 
 violins and human voices rise from the dusky 
 canal. He himself is no longer with us; he is oflf
 
 Life and Literature. 6i 
 
 travelling through the land of imagination in com- 
 pany with his youth and manly vigor and hopes. 
 When that music ceases, another begins — music 
 which proceeds from him and celebrates the games 
 of the wave and of the night, and those polished 
 marbles which live again in memory. 
 
 And so always in the hours of intimate inter- 
 course he seems to me the same person, whether 
 he may be asking questions of his learned friend 
 Leon Pillaut on violins and old refrains, on the 
 guimbarde, the alto and the hautbois, or listen- 
 ing in a grassy plain of Provence to the mystery 
 of the pastoral pipe, making the passers-by stop 
 their carts, or else enjoying in the garden at 
 Champrosay the endless gamut of bird-notes, 
 which regulated for him the hours of spring. 
 
 His eyes, which short-sightedness really sharp 
 ened, though he pretended that they were no good 
 for painting or the plastic arts, perceived color and 
 form with the greatest liveliness notwithstanding. 
 He was one of the very first to appreciate the 
 Impressionists. 
 
 As to masters of painting, naturally his prefer- 
 ences went out to the realists, to the Hollanders 
 and notably to Rembrandt, and to the French 
 school made famous by Troyon, Rousseau, Millet 
 and a score of others. He liked to recall delight- 
 ful hours passed with his friends Bague and 
 Gouvet. The picture-seller Bague delighted him 
 with his robust merry-making eloquence, in which 
 true touches of artistic fervor played hither and 
 thither, all warmed up with slang. I remember
 
 62 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 one entire day passed in turning over Goya's etch- 
 ings; he uttered at the time many radical truths 
 concerning sincerity, tlie excess and paroxysm of 
 which become cruelty; on the combination of 
 grandeur and minuteness which is a distinctive 
 feature in the bull-fight series; on the crude power 
 of shadow and of light ; on the particular disorder 
 in military and artistic matters during that epoch ; 
 on the morbid drying-up, the Etruscan angles and 
 the " voluptuous twist " found in Spain. As it was 
 a matter of the South, it was easy for him to read 
 these Spanish riddles ; at first sight he deciphered 
 for us the fantastic " Proverbs" and " Dreams," 
 
 The conversation ended with a picture of that 
 frenzy which is particular to the peoples of the 
 lands of the sun — the sun, "that alcohol of the 
 South ! " 
 
 During our stay in London he remained for 
 many hours seated in the British Museum before 
 the Furies and the Friezes of the Parthenon : 
 
 " Don't you find that a magnificent music dis- 
 engages itself from these groups? 'Reality and 
 poetry ' — of a truth there is nothing else beside. 
 Those old peoples copied nature. Nature was 
 dancing in that blue air. No separation between 
 the exterior world and the world within ; no one 
 shaken by desire ; never a lack of harmony ! 
 Whenever there is a rhythm anywhere it seems 
 there must have also been some happy inspira- 
 tion." 
 
 " And how as to sorrow, father? " 
 
 ** Sorrow did not put discord into the human
 
 Life and Literature, 63 
 
 being. The latter did not raise a revolution 
 against it. It did not foment disorder." 
 
 The idea that the figures on these friezes might 
 become violent like true daughters of the North, 
 might become Valkyrs, brought him to talk of 
 Wagner's brain, in which two forms of beauty- 
 fought for empire. One, to a certain degree im- 
 movable and in equilibrium, having very gentle 
 waves, being near of kin to the ideal of the Greeks ; 
 the other having a furious form, the boiling well- 
 spring of the Saxon race. 
 
 It is mere laziness of the imagination to divide 
 intellectual men into classes of analysts and syn- 
 theticists according to their works or their speech. 
 Alphonse Daudet was in search of original causes 
 and he triumphed in giving details, but instinct 
 warned him of the exact place where too great 
 division would have dissolved and ruined every- 
 thing. Work offered itself to him as a whole ; he 
 admired it in the mass. A lover of right propor- 
 tions and of exact measure (he himself used as 
 a motto for himself: Ne quid nimis) there was 
 nothing of the miniaturist about him. He saw 
 things in a big way, nor did he reason or discuss 
 matters for the mere pleasure of so doing. He 
 respected deeply every kind of emotion. Quar- 
 rels over words wearied him, just as those ora- 
 torical games in which each participant decides a 
 matter according to his particular temperament 
 without the slightest regard to the opinions of 
 others. Whatever superficial critics, led astray by 
 his monocle and his conscientiousness, may say in
 
 64 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 this regard, he had no use for the microscope in 
 his work. 
 
 The best proof of this is a hatred of what people 
 have agreed to call " art for art's sake." He re- 
 peated this formula with a look of astonishment on 
 his face, for there was no one who was less ready 
 to admit catch-words in conversation Insincerity 
 made him yawn ; " whatever has not roots in actu- 
 ality is dead. Heavens, I know well enough the 
 apology they make for artifice ! Baudelaire in- 
 vented that to use as a weapon, out of pure hatred 
 for fools and fat citizens. Nothing ages so, nothing 
 loses its grip so quickly as what is unusual. * Les 
 Jleiirs du nial,' ' Les petit pocnics en prose ' are 
 marvels and the quintessence of Iruth ; they are 
 precious poems plucked from the very depths of 
 the moral soil. But the imitators of a fad were 
 foolish enough to imagine that they also could 
 build and inhabit the ' kiosqiie en marqueterie ' of 
 which Sainte-Beuve speaks. What an error ! " 
 
 If he loved to put himself in contact with poems, 
 if he excelled in the faculty of reading the most 
 lowly characters and classifying all the movements 
 of the mind, all habits and functional " creases," 
 yet did he also delight in solitude : " Where the 
 form of observation, the vision of the poet and the 
 nicety of mind in the author concentrate and pu- 
 rify themselves." In his agitated youth when he 
 began to be anxious concerning his spiritual and 
 physical health he made some veritable " retreats." 
 He went and shut himself up in a mas of the 
 Camargue, a big farm, and even went to stay in
 
 Life and Literature. 65 
 
 the lighthouse on the Sanguinaires : " The two 
 lighthouse men, forced to live side by side, loathed 
 each other ; one copy of Plutarch all marked up 
 by their great clumsy fingers constituted the li- 
 brary, O Shakespeare ! and filled these simple 
 imaginations with the murmur of battles and of 
 heroism similar to that of the moaning sea. The 
 useful shine of the revolving lantern in the tower 
 lured thither reckless birds which dashed their 
 brains out against the enormous glass lens. The 
 keepers made soup of their bodies. If a storm 
 did not 'bellow,' the revictualling boat would bring 
 us once a week ancient news and fresh preserves. 
 Fine hours have I passed there — sometimes, 't is 
 true, slow, sorrowful and anguished ; but they 
 were hours in which I took stock of myself and 
 judged myself, and listened there to other storms 
 beside those of the ocean. Lucky are they whom 
 necessity suddenly separates from the social gulf 
 and who find themselves in the presence of their 
 own self! People will never know how much 
 exile added to the greatness of Hugo and Voltaire, 
 how the prison of Blanqui increased and enlarged 
 his dream ! " 
 
 After a silence he added: "And, going into 
 that solitude, which one of the men of a single 
 book, unius libri, which would I carry with me? 
 Montaigne or Pascal? Or would I cheat and take 
 an anthology of the masters of prose, or the sub- 
 lime literature of Taine, or the Plutarch of my 
 lighthouse men? A constant interchange of 
 thought goes on between that one book of his 
 
 5
 
 66 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 and the isolated man who is a thinker. It forms 
 a library, an encyclopedia, which the movements 
 of the solitary one's soul engraft upon what is 
 printed ; and the soul boils up again because of 
 that which is printed. Double offspring, starting 
 from the germ of the story of Hajnlet ! slender 
 pamphlet for a bookseller and for Hamlet's 
 author ! When I was living with the Essays 
 as my Bible there was not one of my dreams for 
 which I did not get from them an answer and 
 comfort." 
 
 As head of the family he was forced to renounce 
 his love of solitude, for we never parted from each 
 other ; but my mother always did something to 
 satisfy that love of the country which he kept so 
 vividly alive down to his last moments. 
 
 That delightful valley of Champrosay which 
 played such a great role in our life stretches in 
 reality from Juvisy to Corbeil along the curvings 
 of the Seine and the corresponding caprice of the 
 woods of S^nart. We inhabited successively three 
 houses on the right bank, one of which had be- 
 longed to Eugene Delacroix. It is the village 
 and forest bank open like a cornice to the sun, 
 warm and healthful, and moreover sown with 
 historical castles, Soisy-sous-fitiolles, Lagrange, 
 Grosbois, which recall the 17th century, the Revo- 
 lution and the Empire. The left bank, toward 
 Montlh^ry and Iitampes, traversed by the acque- 
 duct of the Vanne, brings back memories partly 
 similar, partly much older. Some villages belong 
 to the 1 2th century.
 
 Life and Literature. 67 
 
 Formerly my father loved to boat with his 
 neighbors, Gustave Droz and L6on Pillaut, with 
 his friends Gonzague Privot and Annand Syl- 
 vestre, particularly with his brother-in-law Allard ; 
 he passed his life on the Seine and frequented the 
 taverns of coachmen and carters, rowing up those 
 pretty by-streams which lose themselves in private 
 properties, shady parks, or factories : " Once we 
 came to so narrow a little branch and so shallow 
 that we had to disembark and carry the * Arle- 
 sienne ' on my shoulders ; lo and behold, we are 
 in a garden ; a young girl, very much surprised, 
 raises her head from her book and sees us both 
 before her, your uncle and me, very much like the 
 red Indians of Fenimore Cooper, loaded down 
 with the boat and rudder, the oars and the boat- 
 hook." 
 
 At that time, too, he was wont to scour the 
 woods for mushrooms and chestnuts. He was 
 proud of knowing £he proper sort and distinguish- 
 ing the good mushrooms with ends like tittle. He 
 pranced about through the bushes Vv'ith me on his 
 shoulders, dragging my mother after him. In the 
 evening we devoured the gleanings of our harvest. 
 
 He told us how during a wrestling match with 
 the sculptor Zachary Astruc, whose independence 
 and robust talent he admired, he had broken his 
 leg. He was carried home groaning and feverish 
 and particularly preoccupied with a fear that his 
 comrade would be blamed. That very summer's 
 night, which was heavy and stormy, the news- 
 papers brought a terrible piece of news : declara-
 
 68 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 tion of the Franco-German war. He had but one 
 idea after that : get himself healed as soon as pos- 
 sible and be in shape to help his country. " Hor- 
 rible and stupefying period, during which every 
 courier announced a defeat and the countenances 
 of the peasants reflected fear and meanness." 
 Finally he was on his feet again, capable of hold- 
 ing a gun ! 
 
 Later on the state of his health no longer per- 
 mitted him anything more than walks down the 
 alleys of that great park which all our friends 
 know. There is not a bench, there is not a slope 
 which lacks a memory of my beloved. On my 
 arm or on that of my brother his gait was alert and 
 rapid. He would not stop except to light his little 
 pipe, as clever as a herdsman of the Camargue 
 plains to get the better of wind and dust, delighting 
 in " nice little warm shelters," interesting himself 
 in flowers, in garden plots, in vegetables, happy of 
 the slightest embellishment and delighted to show 
 off " his domain." 
 
 It was there one should have seen and heard 
 him, excited by the great " out-of-doors," watch- 
 ing the play of light, listening to the songs of 
 birds, the singing of the cricket and the rustling 
 of the leaves. He improvised extraordinary 
 stories for my very young son, his little Charles, 
 and for my sister Edmee, stories in which every- 
 thing about us played its part — magical, delight- 
 ful tales which placed the beauty of things in 
 nature on a level with those budding intellects, 
 moved them and held them attentive to the point
 
 Life and Literature. 69 
 
 of closing their eyes in order to enjoy the feast all 
 the more. 
 
 There is the secret pulsation of his genius : In a 
 few exact and a few simple images, the objects 
 corresponding to which are near to us, he touches 
 our soul. There is the word and there lies the 
 object. Even grains of sand and sticks of wood 
 and bark he rendered animate. He would say 
 that that insect had carried off the end of his 
 story and in order to pursue the robber he would 
 stick his glass in his eye. In these little games 
 thus organized, while little hands pressed his 
 hands and the " Thank you, Papa," " Thank you, 
 Grandpapa," resounded — in these homelike and 
 fairylike pictures one finds again his subtle and 
 simple art with its thousand delicate shades, like to 
 one of those flowers whose fragrance lends balmi- 
 ness to the air. 
 
 When the heat of the d^ lessened we would 
 take a drive in the family landau. My mother 
 has a pronounced taste for things of the past. 
 She points out many an ancient residence such 
 as that home of Mme. de Beaumont at Savigny 
 which the grass and mosses are slowly invading. 
 Autumn is the finest season here; across the 
 broad plain one sees the fires of the rubbish 
 heaps. My father expresses his longing for hap- 
 piness : '* An old mansion broad and somewhat 
 low, with an extension consisting of farmhouse 
 and poultry yard. In the hearths the crackling 
 wood of the pruned vines. A few selected friends 
 and the snow outside. Absolute and tender con-
 
 70 Alpho7ise Daudet. 
 
 fidence among all present. Chats and delightful 
 readings aloud. The old people are not morose, 
 the young are neither pedantic nor bitter. Life is 
 one delight." 
 
 In one of his last letters received at Grenoble 
 whilst I was serving with the Alpine regiment he 
 wrote to me: "Fancy to yourself one of those 
 delightful ' artist consolers,' such as I have 
 dreamed of being myself, dwelling in some old 
 property near the gates of a little town with ram- 
 parts and mall, passing two months in Paris, a 
 few weeks on the Nile or in Spitzbergen, but at 
 last getting tired of running about and then find- 
 ing his completest pleasure in a few roomfuls of 
 friends, crowded on the traditional days of the 
 calendar year — Christmas, New Year's, St. John's 
 Day, Thanksgiving Day. Such a man as that 
 might print a book consisting of numberless 
 volumes embodying ,^our very best society. He 
 could put at the close of the last volume pub- 
 lished ' to continue ' and then the ' Book of Life,* 
 or the 'Science of Life ' would be under way." 
 
 In the chapter entitled " The Vendor of Hap- 
 piness," I shall show what it was he meant by 
 those words " The Science of Life." 
 
 The intervals in the little note-books are de- 
 lightful and stunning landscape pieces. In such 
 caseSj as in others, he only noted the domi- 
 nant points ; things that strike and trouble us in 
 some spectacle of nature are hit off in a few 
 precise, clear and vibrating words, as quick and 
 sharp as the impression of the spectacle itself.
 
 Life and Literature. 71 
 
 One day I was turning over the leaves of these 
 masterpieces and said to him : " You recall old 
 Hokusai to me — old ' Crazy-for-drawi)ig^ who 
 at the end of his life stated that he almost under- 
 stood the form of living creatures and could al- 
 most fix line and point as they should be." 
 
 He answered : " I have not reached that point. 
 How bitter it is to me, this gap between that 
 which my pen sets down and that which my soul 
 has perceived ! I sufifer from the torture of not 
 expressing myself. How can one render and ex- 
 press that swifter pulsation in our veins which 
 comes when one looks upon the evening star 
 rendered golden by the autumn, or a little lake 
 upon which the sunlight separates itself into its 
 component parts, or an horizon with beautifully 
 pure lines, or a stormy sky, copper-colored and 
 black, a dusky abyss in the midst of the blue 
 heavens? How express the way in which a mem- 
 ory palpitates at a given hour, or tell what part 
 of us it is that lingers in things, what it is in us 
 which weeps and smiles in accord with them ? 
 Through my lips how many impressions have 
 escaped which are rebellious to verbal forms ! " 
 
 Still, if ever methods of work were submitted 
 to the rules of natural law they were his. In his 
 turbulent youth he never seated himself at his 
 writing-table except when fired by his subject. 
 He stated that a talent was an " intensity " of 
 life ; and his stories are a proof of that formula. 
 
 Later on, through the happy influence of his 
 " direct collaboration " he made channels for and
 
 72 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 regulated his wonderful faculty as an improvisot. 
 He got the habit of daily work and, as usually 
 happens, his brain became more supple in re- 
 sponse to the appeal and submitted to the dis- 
 cipline. Fromont yennc et Risler Atne, yack, 
 Le Nababy Les Rots en Exil, L Evang^liste were 
 so many continuous and unbending efforts. Sum- 
 mer or winter he rose at an early hour and 
 went at once to work on his task without other 
 means of excitement than a dip in cold water; 
 then he covered page after page with that little 
 close-set, nervous and elegant handwriting of his 
 which his illness made still more delicate with- 
 out taking from it any of its attributes. Many 
 a time have I remarked upon the likeness of his 
 " graphic type " to that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 
 There are the same excessively minute distinctions, 
 the same intervals between letters and words, the 
 same care in punctuation and the same sharpness 
 in the handwriting. The similarities are very 
 evident between the handwriting of my father and 
 the manuscript of the Nouvelle HHo'ise, which I 
 was able to examine one evening at the Chateau 
 des Cretes, thanks to the kindness of Mme. Arnaud 
 de I'Ariege. 
 
 He erased with courage and frequently; at the 
 first blush a mere sketch served as it were for a 
 canvas. My mother and he then took this " mon- 
 ster " up again, expending the greatest pains on 
 its style and bringing into relationship that har- 
 moniousness and that need to be real which were 
 always the writer's care. " Without my wife I
 
 Life and Literature. 73 
 
 should have given myself up to my facility for 
 writing. It was only later that perfection tor- 
 mented me." 
 
 After that slow and disagreeable proving, the 
 third and finished copy was made. Those whose 
 imaginations are in the state of flame may readily 
 understand the peculiar merit in sacrificing " go" 
 to exactness and making enthusiasm perfect. In 
 my father's soul the word itself was that which 
 called the idea forth. In the case of a formalist 
 like Baudelaire, for instance, the word curtails and 
 reins in the lyrical results, it limits in place of 
 rousing up ; in the case of Alphonse Daudet, 
 however, the word excited an entire world of 
 sensation and form. Thus, the man whom the 
 " word " renders drunk can never know the de- 
 light of achievement. My father was a Latin 
 genius and was the possessor of a sense of pro- 
 portion and of measure. 
 
 Without entering into the critic's domain, a 
 thing which would hardly suit my actual part, it 
 may be permitted me to note the constant evolu- 
 tion of a temperament like my father's, a tempera- 
 ment so virile and so lucid. His first works, 
 burning and super-abounding as they are, give 
 signs of less anxious care than those that came 
 after, so far as nicety of language and of equili- 
 brium are concerned. They spring rather from 
 temperament than from character. 
 
 The traits which particularly belong to my father 
 are a conciseness in rendering picturesque motives, 
 an intimate blending of nature moral with nature
 
 74 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 physical, and a disdain of useless ornaments, to a 
 degree which no one has shown at a higher point, 
 not even the greatest of writers. Human beings 
 are characterized according as they absorb sensa- 
 tions, think and act; each type is completed by 
 its own passions ; no outside traits are added to 
 overload the picture. Every brush-mark tells its 
 story and is harmonious with the whole. A book 
 by him is of such a kind that in memory it follows 
 the very movements of life. Firm and solid in its 
 expository parts, uplifted as regards the chief 
 matter, it is turbulent in critical passages and 
 calm after the close of a crisis. 
 
 Every person in the book has his or her own 
 atmosphere, every scene has its own culminating 
 point ; the whole hurries toward a common goal. 
 The central model is embellished by a multitude 
 of particular examples. Next comes that classic 
 powei" which his contemporaries themselves have 
 noted, that elegant and sustained vigor which 
 preserves the work from any sudden labelling of 
 naturalistic or realistic, and attaches it to national 
 tradition, to the deep-seated and harmonious lit- 
 erary heritage of our race. 
 
 The fact is that labor does not begin at the 
 moment when the artist takes his pen. It begins 
 in sustained reflection and in the thought which 
 accumulates images and sifts them, garners and 
 winnows them out and compels life to keep con- 
 trol over imagination, and imagination to expand 
 and enlarge life. The heroes of those romances 
 and dramas of his, the words of the conversations
 
 Life and Literature. 75 
 
 they hold and the places they frequent, are not 
 products of a super-heated imagination, not parts 
 of the mind of their creator which are, as so often 
 happens, terribly enlarged and diversified — the 
 bold impressions of one and the same man im- 
 agining himself possessed of opposite passions. 
 Alphonse Daudet was always a portal wide open 
 and tremendously alive to the entrance of natural 
 phenomena. His senses transmitted to his brain 
 the most exact, the most generous and the truest 
 observations. His brain made a choice among 
 them and organized from them their marshalling. 
 
 He lived with the persons of his book as with 
 friends. He put them questions on all sorts of 
 topics and listened to their answers. He tempted 
 them with vices and virtues and followed the 
 working of these ideas in their minds until he 
 obtained complete figures and reached the myster- 
 ious limits of the laughable and the impenetrable. 
 He would rather cause them to act than to argue, 
 being by no means ignorant that a truthful ges- 
 ture is the immediate ruin of a thousand theories 
 and that a sudden change of face is more power- 
 ful than the most subtle discussion. He knew that 
 characters betrayed themselves through typical 
 phrases — that hybrid individuals with an oval 
 and undetermined physiognomy, who have as it 
 were enfeebled our epoch, nevertheless do have 
 special moments of a brilliant and determined 
 life. 
 
 So he granted to cowards occasional pluckings- 
 up of courage ; to the bold, periods of weakness ;
 
 76 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 to the weak, moments of strength, and to liars, 
 impulses of truth; to hypocrites, times when masks 
 fall ; to chatterers, spells of silence ; to hide- 
 bound persons, singular relaxations ; to chaste 
 people, low dreams, and to the vicious, ideas of 
 chastity. He had cross-examined woman and 
 placed her in the confessional in her various roles 
 as mother, wife and lover; in her generosities, her 
 perverse actions, her ordinary tastes ; in her faults, 
 terrors and anguish. He knew the taste of every 
 sort of tear, he held the key to every sort of sor- 
 row. No intricate path of remorse or of regret 
 escaped him. 
 
 He did not fail even to study the mirror-like 
 and complex souls of children. And over all his 
 conversations, over his patient research and his 
 precise knowledge he cast the merciful cloak 
 of a philosopher whom no dreadful spectacle has 
 hardened and no human horror has disgusted — 
 one who has not grown weary of mankind. 
 
 We often used to laugh among ourselves at the 
 ease with which some men treated him amicably 
 as a " locust," or "cicada," men who sum up the 
 entire South of France with a single emblem. In 
 many an obituary note, otherwise sympathetic or 
 enthusiastic, I have met with these suggestions 
 of "enchanter" or "troubadour" or "light poet." 
 Nothing could be more false than such an idea. 
 It is true my father was realist enough to admit 
 that " gayety " and " charm" have also a place in 
 existence ; since nothing is uniformly black and 
 cruel; but that harsh labor in his own mind is
 
 Life and Literature. 77 
 
 badly expressed by a suggestion of legs scratch- 
 ing wings, of a rattling in the sunlight. 
 
 When we come to publish in their entirety the 
 thoughts jotted down in his notebooks, people 
 will see with what zeal he studied out for us those 
 ideas of forms which are more tangible and hu- 
 man. An admirably gifted poet, he was as sus- 
 picious of metaphors as any philologist or biologist, 
 just as he was suspicious of the slightest cause for 
 error in other respects. 
 
 He finds in life an episode, a striking trait. 
 With a few clear words he fixes it, and then con- 
 tinues the task begun. The first noting of it over- 
 whelms him with parallels. It may be that it is 
 the germ and the beginning of a book ; but this 
 book itself offers itself to him from several points 
 of view in a way which I cannot express better 
 than as the attitudes of a living man. So, then, 
 it becomes a series of sketches and more or less 
 intense and exact drawings, in which the large 
 constructive lines are already strongly marked. 
 
 As ideas are thus associated, the moral ele- 
 ments approach each other and come together in 
 intimate union. Now the high lights can be dis- 
 tinguished ; types, situations, portraits and conver- 
 sations spring from two distinct origins, one of 
 them basic and primordial, the other fragmentary, 
 altering day by day, and always subject to the 
 changes of fact. It forms a mulatikre ^ of reminis- 
 cence and improvised additions. The being thus 
 
 ^ Name of a suburb of Lyon, but here it probably stands foi 
 mulassili-e or " hybrid."
 
 yS Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 metamorphosed comes slowly toward the author 
 through the mist. What joy when he feels that 
 he has his model thoroughly there and needs to 
 work only upon secondary parts and improve- 
 ments ! Nevertheless the last selection is always 
 a subtle and laborious one. 
 
 Alphonse Daudet's mind was of such a sort that 
 details of his work offer an abridged resemblance 
 of the whole. That is why his novel affects us 
 like an hallucination and makes every reader a 
 witness to the drama. 
 
 Take Delobelle as he appears to us. From one 
 end of his biography to the other he remains ex- 
 actly in accord with his outline ; you will never 
 see the hand or the arm of the author. It is the 
 same thing with the Nabob, Numa, Bompard, Paul 
 Astier and the others. This extraordinary con- 
 tinuousness in a figure proves a complete assimi- 
 lation of the author with the character created. 
 His imagination has no jumps and bounds which 
 interfere with observation and subtract whatever 
 may be gained by lyrical liveliness from truthful- 
 ness to the fact. 
 
 That explains how there comes to be, alongside 
 of the Daudet who writes, a Daudet who lives and 
 talks; it is necessary to leave the picture of him 
 incomplete, such as I trace it here. That which 
 my father did not put in his book, the overflow of 
 his brain which he would have feared to use as 
 surplus matter, all this unemployed force was 
 found again in his conversation and his acts. The 
 tree, it is true, has left immortal fruit, but at the
 
 Life and Literature. 79 
 
 same time sap was running through its branches 
 and out to their extremest points, to the stems of 
 the leaves and flowers. 
 
 I have said that he worked with tremendous 
 vigor; nevertheless no amount of work prevented 
 him from receiving a friend, aiding a comrade, or 
 giving counsel to a young man. My sudden run- 
 nings into the room did not irritate him. He 
 would welcome us with a kind word or a joke. 
 He took an interest in the whole house, in the 
 sense that every hour was good, as far as he was 
 concerned. He had no regular hours. From the 
 time he ceased to go out he passed his life at his 
 table, reading or taking notes; summer or winter 
 he got up at half-past seven and went to bed at 
 eleven o'clock, except on Thursday, when we kept 
 a longer watch. 
 
 For Thursday was his day of recreation. His 
 uncommon amicability was the reason for the 
 great pleasure he took in those simple but most 
 interesting receptions, at which we saw in active 
 play the most splendid intelligences belonging to 
 our time. My father enlivened everything, started 
 and kept up discussions, warmed the timid, soothed 
 the angry ones, put a truce to hostilities, softened 
 rancors and strengthened sympathies. 
 
 In the miserable drivel of a poor broken-down 
 symbolist, a man, besides, who never knew him, 1 
 have read this strange statement: that Alphonse 
 Daudet could never forgive ! In the first place 
 he did not know of most of those attacks with 
 which the young bald-heads of the small reviews
 
 8o Alphonsc Daiidet. 
 
 did not fail to regale him ; and for the very 
 good reason that he did not read them ; besides, 
 even had he read them, they would at most 
 have brought to his lips an indulgent smile, so 
 entirely indifferent did such appreciations leave 
 him. But several of his enemies who became his 
 sincere friends might bear witness to the kindliness 
 and ease of forgetting things which he always 
 showed in literary discussions. 
 
 " Most of the time people don't understand each 
 other. Ferocious and time-honored antipathies 
 do not stand a moment before a few minutes' 
 contact." 
 
 And although there was a constellation of the 
 " arrived " and of the " illustrious " at those Thurs- 
 day reunions, there was also no lack of be- 
 ginners, because he had a warm interest in new 
 talents. Uncertain of himself, he did not disdain 
 those obscure powers which announce themselves 
 in some writer of the future and issue out in over- 
 whelming or paradoxical words, in a frenzy of 
 criticism or of blind enthusiasm, A great number 
 of those who to-day hold the first rank were in 
 their days of beginning encouraged and sustained 
 by him. What a host of letters to editors, to 
 managers of newspapers and theatres, what a lot 
 of recommendations and notes of introduction! 
 "Alas," said he, " 1 can no longer use my actual 
 presence ! " He knew very well the power of his 
 own speech and what the most eloquent letter 
 lacks in persuasive gestures and accents 'of sin- 
 cerity.
 
 Life ami Literature. 8 1 
 
 That love of youth, even in its faults and vanities, 
 was part of his eager desire to know : he wished 
 to see and luiderstaiid. An attitude, a grasp of 
 the hand, a look, a word from a person revealed 
 more to him than a piece of verse or a picture. 
 He adored Plutarch, who in his biographies fol- 
 lowed the sensible rule which adds to the portrait 
 of a great man his way of eating, drinking and 
 walking, his preferences and even his hobbies. He 
 approved absolutely certain decisive pages which 
 Marcel Schwob wrote on this subject at the be- 
 ginning of his Vies Irnaginaires. Details which 
 are small in appearance are in fact serious chan- 
 nels through which we penetrate to the clearer 
 view of ancient times and thread the labyrinth 
 of dead souls. 
 
 Opinions are " things of the word," transitory 
 and insignificant things ; that is the reason that 
 the life of political people is generally so wretched 
 and commonplace. The market-place, the preto- 
 rian tribune, the ante-chambers of sovereigns, fed- 
 eral chambers and legislatures, as well as the 
 conversations there taking place, are no better 
 than ghosts, phantoms and masks. This or that 
 habit, this vice, that peculiarity of speech or of 
 costume, this touch of gluttony or luxury in Tal- 
 leyrand or Napoleon the Great becomes in our 
 eyes extremely important and takes on the lively 
 air of a confession. This it is that is called by 
 pedants bonhomie, but more correctly by others 
 " humanity." 
 
 Now what interests us in such notes as these in 
 6
 
 82 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 history is that quality whereby they dififer from 
 other things, whatever may be the differences 
 themselves. 
 
 When he was creating my father saw what he 
 created. When he was writing he heard. A 
 certain number of physicians belonging to the new 
 school came to interview him on this point and 
 in pedantic words they have simplified a natural 
 and complete method. Ever since the celebrated 
 " Schema " of Charcot, people keep repeating 
 indefinitely the old scholastic distinction between 
 " auditives " and "rituals," categories which have 
 nothing absolute in them, and are of no use ex- 
 cept as an hypothesis. And if he heard he also 
 spoke. He practised the sound of his dialogues 
 and tried the harmony of his descriptions. Fear 
 of wordiness, which was always on the increase 
 with him, caused him to use, especially in his 
 last works, a picturesque brevity in which every 
 sensation is like a lightning flash ; reflection does 
 not come to the surface but silently emanates from 
 the characters. He has been reproached, but very 
 foolishly, for his curt and nervous phrases which 
 are as near the actuality as possible, since every 
 word plays a trick with us and deceives us as to 
 its duration. 
 
 I have forgotten none of the fine regulations 
 which he scrupulously applied : " Whether the 
 question is a book or an article, whether a direct 
 creation or a criticism, never take up the pen 
 unless you have something to say!' If the literary 
 mania continues to develop itself, very soon there
 
 Life and Literature. 83 
 
 will not be a single Frenchman who has not got 
 out his own book. 
 
 " Setting, ideas, situations, characters, all these 
 are not right until a very slow and instructive 
 digestion has been gone through with, in which all 
 nature, gifted in the least of its component parts, 
 collaborates with the writer. We are like women 
 in a hopeful situation ; people can see it in our 
 very faces. We have the pregnant woman's 
 ' mask.' 
 
 " Style is a state of intensity. The greatest 
 number of things in the fewest number of words. 
 Don't fear to repeat yourself, according to Pascal's 
 counsel. There are no synonyms. 
 
 " Push alwa}^s toward clearness and concise 
 lucidity. Our tongue has its own moral laws. 
 Whoever attempts to avoid them will not last. 
 Our tongue is suppler than any other, as intel- 
 lectual as it is logical, more closely ranged than 
 declamatory and has quick and short reflections in 
 very precise forms. It is not favorable to antique 
 terms or phrases. It appeals more to the mind 
 than the ear. There are very few shades which it 
 does not express, very few true distinctions which 
 it does not define. It is especially triumphant 
 when expressing ideas suggested. 
 
 " Descendants of the Latins, who were a con- 
 structive people, we have a taste for solid things. 
 Harmony also is indispensable, even for picturing 
 the passions where disorder is a beauty. Let that 
 same disorder only be a seeming one: let us be 
 aware of a profound rule and order underneath!
 
 84 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 That will always be in conformity with the 
 truth ; the worst of tempests submits to its own 
 laws. 
 
 " Description of a character carried on to its 
 final completion should not be made except little 
 by little, according as the character reveals itself 
 and according as life reacts upon it. 
 
 " Society, landscape and circumstances, all that 
 environs us, have a share in our state of mind. 
 You must enter into the person you are de- 
 scribing, into his very skin, and see the world 
 through his eyes and feel it through his senses. 
 Direct intervention on the part of the writer is an 
 error. 
 
 " On the other hand the theory of impassiveness 
 is exaggerated. He who tells a story has the 
 right to be moved, himself; but with discretion, 
 and as it were behind the scenes, by the affairs of 
 heroes and heroines, but without doing harm to 
 that illusion which makes the charm. All the live 
 forces of the author are taken up by the expression 
 of reality. Lyricism, realism and even frenzy, all 
 these may unite and produce power. Beauty has 
 no label. Sincerity includes everything. 
 
 " It is necessary to have respect for the reader : 
 An author has morally a guardianship over souls. 
 Sure of his means and being able to corrupt, he is 
 culpable if he abuses his trust, if he ruins vital 
 nobility, if he does not go from below upward, 
 which is the direction of an honest conscience. 
 Intellectually, too, he should have respect for the 
 reader and insist only upon the essential things,
 
 Life and Literature. 85 
 
 not falsify enthusiasm but keep his scrupulousness 
 simple and pure. 
 
 " Truth is a perfect union of soul between the 
 author and that which surrounds him, between 
 that which he conceives and perceives and that 
 which he expresses. The realm of imagination 
 itself has its truth. There are lies on Mount 
 Parnassus as well as in the street. 
 
 " Art consists of more than mere selection. It 
 includes decision and boldness besides. No hypo- 
 crisy, no fraud ! The roadways of life lie open. 
 It is not permitted to deviate from them nor to 
 halt by the way. 
 
 " There is the courage of the author to be con- 
 sidered, which consists in accomplishing his mis- 
 sion to the very end. The bold are always 
 victorious. The timid ones always remain incom- 
 plete. It is not necessary to help on one's work ; 
 because it goes of itself. No obstacle, however 
 frank and powerful, will prevent its triumph- 
 ing. 
 
 " There is danger in thinking about pleasing. 
 Another danger is to wish to astonish. Notoriety 
 flies always from those who seek it through low 
 means." 
 
 A very incomplete enumeration. I shall rec- 
 tify it as I go on. My father presented the 
 same principles in the richest and most multitu- 
 dinous forms. But the foundation remains un 
 changed. 
 
 These few profound and solid rules, which he 
 laid down whilst we were talking in private, gave
 
 86 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 him the chance to use a delightful variety of images 
 and of impressions for all the rest, for the transi- 
 tory affairs of life. Just as in conversation he was 
 never caught napping when a reply was due from 
 him, for he uttered it quickly, brilliantly and in 
 winged words, in the same way the small affairs of 
 daily intercourse and the most trivial episodes 
 could never take him unawares. We had gradually 
 formed such a habit of these delightful and charm- 
 ing conversations during which the hours slipped 
 by over our books, that an elliptical language had 
 gradually grown up between us for our own special 
 use. Each one filled out the other's thought and 
 then prolonged the idea by a remark, the sense of 
 which he indicated in the fewest words, where only 
 the essential was uttered. 
 
 That you will find again in his work; it is a 
 faithful mold of his mind. The largest good sense, 
 that masterly gift in comparison with which the 
 most brilliant qualities are worth but little, ani- 
 mates the whole of his work with a deathless breath 
 — that good sense which Descartes called " least 
 common to man." So fruitful is its action that 
 it no longer expresses itself but leaves the field 
 clear to the imagination, which thereafter becomes 
 as free as any goddess, smiling, fleeing and clad 
 in curtal robe. 
 
 The reader is ever close behind the author and 
 the author inspires him with confidence. Take 
 for example some poet, Carlyle, we will say, a rain 
 of stars and of metaphors which play across the 
 sky and the veiled night. Notwithstanding all his
 
 Life and Literature. ^'j 
 
 genius, why has Carlyle only a very narrow place 
 in human imaginings? It is because he lacks that 
 intimate harmony which souls ecstatic over fancied 
 images unconsciously demand. He has never con 
 quered our confidence. A word from the lips, a 
 slightest word from the lips of him who has com- 
 pletely conquered us by his wisdom takes on a 
 magical value. Whither he ascends, thither we 
 follow. We fraternize through enthusiasm. A 
 sympathy is set up between the most magnificent 
 genius and the reader. We are astonished, we are 
 astonished, but we are not conquered. 
 
 What I have attempted to express as well as I 
 could in these words was carved into my mind by 
 my father in clear and marvellously exact terms. 
 I myself was one of his works. He desired to 
 finish me in ev^ery part as he did the others. Alas, 
 poor stuff that it was ! If you have not been able 
 to profit by his teaching, at any rate pass on his 
 fertile words ! Be exact and truthful ! Perhaps 
 another will be found for whom this torch, piously 
 relit, may show the way. Many a time while 
 listening to my friend have I thought: 
 
 " If I am destined to survive him, I shall call 
 upon my memory for a grand effort of revival. I 
 shall impose upon myself the task of putting down 
 in writing those fugitive beauties, often as impos- 
 sible to transmit as words of love which lack the 
 time and the countenances of the lovers," And 
 ye who read, be indulgent to me, for I bring 
 hither my entire conscience. A witness of a most 
 noble spectacle, I have tried to retain phrases,
 
 88 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 gestures, intonations and play of features. My 
 fatlier loved the truth. I wish to serve truth in 
 my turn down to the most intimate scenes, guided 
 by him and encouraged by the lofty recollection 
 of his character.
 
 III. 
 
 AS FATHER AND AS HUSBAND — THE VENDOR 
 OF HAPPINESS. 
 
 My father was often wont to repeat: " When my 
 task is finished I should Hke to estabHsh myself as 
 a Vendor of Happiness; my profits would consist 
 in my success." 
 
 Then he would add : " There are so many men 
 who are somnambulists and pass through exist- 
 ance without seeing where they are, stumbling 
 against obstacles and bruising their brows against 
 walls which it would be easy for them to circum- 
 vent ! I have put this phrase in the mouth of one 
 of my characters : ' All things in life have a side 
 or a meaning through which they can be grasped.' 
 But that is no metaphor." 
 
 Then he would toss his head with an indulgent 
 half smile and a sigh : " There is no such thing 
 as commonplace in the world ; it only exists in 
 people's minds. Renan is a little sad because 
 Gavroche is as learned as he is. But Gavroche is 
 a parrot. In his brain words have no value at all. 
 Suppose a young person talks about death. It is 
 very rarely the case that one notices in him the 
 existence of that black gulf which this terrible syl- 
 lable at once opens in the soul of an old man.
 
 90 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 You know the emotion which all of a sudden comes 
 upon us at sight of some noun or verb which we 
 had been carelessly repeating up to the day on 
 which the true and deep-seated meaning appeared 
 to us. Revelations of that sort are the result of 
 the teaching of years. 
 
 " I am not boasting, I was a precocious mind. 
 At an early age I understood, in my very bones, the 
 actual value of many of the words which youth 
 employs with the utmost carelessness and ease. 
 Disease and sorrow produce another sort of matur- 
 ity. They lend truthfulness to language. In such 
 cases people live ori their capital instead of living 
 on their interest ; for it cannot be ignored that 
 emotions and even a somewhat burning thought 
 represent a loss of substance, the 07ic step farther 
 on. Oh, the wisdom of the very sick ! Oh, eyes 
 too brilliant and too well informed ! In the public 
 gardens, dragged about in sick chairs, I meet 
 people whose looks frighten me." 
 
 " Then, father, the vendor of happiness . . . ? " 
 "I mean no allegory; the vendor would go to. 
 the sick and to every one ; by tenderness he would 
 gain their confidence; like a patient and gentle 
 physician he would examine the moral wound, 
 mark its extent and progress and reassure the 
 sick man through the spectacle of his fellows; 
 that is the argument of egoism which never faileth! 
 From that point he would gradually rise toward 
 the picture of a restricted but still a noble destiny, 
 if only the patient knows how to employ himself 
 by drying the tears about him and consoling others
 
 As Father and as Husband. 91 
 
 while consoling himself. To put one's goal beyond 
 oneself, to place one's ideal outside of oneself — 
 that is to escape from Fate to a certain extent." 
 
 How many a time, entering unexpectedl)' his 
 study, have I not caught sight of attitudes of 
 anguish in his visitors and interrupted confidences 
 which I felt were grave and pressing! If secrecy 
 had not been asked my friend would then show 
 the situation to me, and all the difficulties whose 
 simplest and most " humane " solution he was 
 seeking. 
 
 But when I said to him : " Be vendor of happi- 
 ness to yourself ! " he answered: " My existence 
 is a mere matter of effort from day to day. I have 
 the greatest confidence in those little efforts of the 
 will which bind me down to some fixed hour, such 
 as to seat myself at the table notwithstanding my 
 sufferings, to disdain and affront my illness. Ima- 
 gine the torture of the circular wall which little by 
 little grows smaller, the torture of one impossibil- 
 ity after the .other ! How true it is, that phrase 
 repeated by the coquette in front of her looking- 
 glass : 71? tlmik that I shall regret all that to-mor- 
 roiv ! Well, the never-ending cares of the father 
 of a family, the anxieties as to my household 
 are a great resource for me. The feeling of respon- 
 sibility is enough to keep a man on his legs after 
 his strength has given out. Then I think about 
 my fellow-men. If financial want is added to their 
 sufferings, if they have not the resources of fire 
 and of food and of wine and of warm affection — 
 why then I consider myself still happier.
 
 92 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 " I keep my pitifulness fresh by repeating to 
 myself that there are far worse sorrows than mine, 
 and so I do not use up all my pity on myself. 
 You know that a good many philosophers banish 
 pity from their republic as if it were a weakness or 
 degradation, or as if it were a lack of energy. 
 
 " The vendor of happiness would preach the 
 religion of active pity and not of useless fears. To 
 him who suffers, suffering is always new. But to 
 witnesses thereof, even tender and energetic ones, 
 suffering grows old and becomes a mere habit. 
 I tell a sick person: ' Give yourself distractions 
 and through your spirit wrestle to the very end ; 
 do not weary and harass the people about 
 you.' " 
 
 " The Stoics long ago discovered the pleasure 
 which people find in the constant exercise of 
 energy. I could suggest a thousand tricks to a 
 patient who is gifted with imagination. I would 
 advise a person who is not able to mix laughter with 
 actualities to place his sufferings before him on a 
 grand scale until he reaches the point when the 
 beauty of the struggle makes its appearance and 
 gives grandeur to the whole. That is a particular 
 kind of intoxication which makes the least subtle 
 person strangely intelligent ; // is one of the keys of 
 human nature. 
 
 " And, to start with, everything takes its place 
 and falls into its natural plane. Little trivial 
 sorrows which increase for us our enjoyments 
 and moral laziness recoil toward the background 
 and reach their proper level. Had it not been for
 
 As Father and as Husband. 93 
 
 my sickness, perhaps I might have been an 
 'author,' a prey to the sillinesses of the profession, 
 trembling at criticism, off my head through praise 
 and duped by empty triumphs. Of course I have 
 weaknesses . . . nevertheless I have been puri- 
 fied. . . At the Lamalou Baths I have met ' So- 
 sies^ of suffering' in the shape of men belonging 
 to the most varied professions. They were all 
 transcendental and ' above themselves,' lighted 
 up by swift gleams which traversed their flesh and 
 penetrated their very souls. 
 
 " Among the confessions which I have received, 
 those made me by the damned ones down there 
 seem to show a special kind of harshness and 
 frankness. The very words they use have more 
 breadth and more relief." 
 
 The notes taken by my father in regard to this 
 subject during his stay at hot baths are very 
 typical and fine. Such observations on the part 
 of a man of letters astonished the physicians, 
 because they were more complete and subtle than 
 those which might have been collected by a 
 scientist. Without preconceived ideas and inter- 
 mingled theories, they possessed the clearness of a 
 cross-examination put on paper. The most fright- 
 ful shames, the secret wretchednesses of men, 
 women and aged men are stated there discreetly 
 with the wisdom of a physician-poet. Most of 
 our neighbors in the hotel, some of them stran- 
 gers from America, Spain and Russia, arranged 
 
 1 Character in the Amphitryon of Plautus, whose semblance 
 was taken by Mercury ; Moliere used him in one of his plays.
 
 94 Alpho7ise Daudet. 
 
 their hours so as to made their treatment coincide 
 with that of the novelist. He reassured them and 
 quieted their spirits, thus completing the work of 
 the physician. Many of them confided to him 
 with that zeal in giving details, that ardor and 
 extraordinary pride which are common to people 
 who possess a grave and still undefined malady. 
 He noted down, classified and compared the most 
 peculiar nervous troubles, manias, fears, chronic 
 or recurrent disorders ; these deviations from the 
 course of nature often aided him in understand- 
 ing nature ; they would light up some obscure 
 region and thus do service to his constant search 
 after knowledge. 
 
 " Evil in the family and society," such modifi- 
 cations as it makes in characters, temperaments 
 and trades, the ingeniousness shown by egotists, 
 rich or poor, these are the questions which in- 
 flamed him and warmed his blood ; these he col- 
 lected at every moment with a methodicalness and 
 conscientiousness most uncommon. 
 
 There are entire lives which are summed up in 
 a few lines: "Misers turned to spendthrifts" — 
 " violent men become timorous " — " chaste peo- 
 ple tormented by passions they dare not avow." 
 Initials call back to me names and faces and sor- 
 rowful outlines. A word is enough to bring up 
 a whole personality; "ruined careers"- — there is 
 one like the title for a chapter. Frightful odds 
 and ends of a dialogue : " Sir, what I fear the 
 most is the moment when I do not suffer. This 
 evening my imagination shudders. . . I see all my
 
 As Father and as Husband. 95 
 
 hopes dashed to the ground — love, future. . . 
 ah! . . " 
 
 Sometimes a smile or a funny phrase lights up 
 these frightful pictures. A give-away phrase ! Like 
 to lightning which for an instant illuminates the 
 landscape, such a phrase lights up the hidden 
 depths of a being, that labyrinth into which even 
 the most intimate observation penetrates in vain. 
 
 It was owing to such facts as these that my 
 father perceived this idea which he has so often 
 expressed: " No matter how much of a realist one 
 may be, a writer recoils before the reality. Dis- 
 courses that one gets off, vanities that one shows 
 off, passions in which one wallows, all that is so 
 much parade before the multitude. 
 
 " Beside this there is an abyss which no one 
 dares to stir, mud which does not belong to our 
 being, a thick and miry mud in which are the 
 half-formed models for all vices and all crimes 
 such as do not even reach the priest's confessional. 
 Would it be possible a single time to plunge down 
 there? That is what I have often asked myself. 
 Let us imagine, then, some dark and secret place, 
 for example a hospital for maladies of the eyes, in 
 which people, lying near each other side by side 
 in absolute black darkness, ignoring each other's 
 names and age, and almost each other's sex, 
 moreover never intending to see each other again, 
 should freely express themselves and avow what 
 torments them, whispering as it were gropingly 
 from bed to bed." 
 
 He applied to his sorrows the celebrated axiom :
 
 96 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 " Poetry is deliverance ; " whence that sketch for 
 a book called La Doiilou whose elements he 
 had collected, which he did not publish, however, 
 owing to our insistence. Here it is before me, 
 that terrible and implacable breviary ! Certainly 
 it did need a fine courage "to deliver oneself" 
 after such a fashion ; but have I not already indi- 
 cated the fierce necessity of confessing himself 
 which my father showed? 
 
 In our days science has taken on pretentious 
 airs. Science has believed that she could conquer 
 the spirit. Alphonse Daudet was too sagacious to 
 believe in the labels called psychology, physiol- 
 ogy, pathology — labels which the wind blows 
 away and the rain defaces. 
 
 Auguste Comte's dogma had never secured any 
 hold upon his imagination, always so clear and 
 always in action, one that never accepted fine 
 words for facts. We used to amuse ourselves to- 
 gether over that impudence shown in explaining 
 and systematizing everything which is the mark 
 of the modern pedant: "the husk of words for 
 the grain of things " according to Leibnitz. He 
 had had long conversations with powerful and 
 lucid Charcot, with Brown-S6quard, tormented by 
 his genius, with Potain, the master of masters, in 
 whom pity went on increasing as his knowledge 
 grew. So he did not fail to know all there was 
 to know upon that other side of the human riddle 
 which bears different mottos and teaches us by 
 two very different ways. There as elsev/here his 
 power of comprehension had served him well.
 
 As Father and as Husband. 97 
 
 But by the power of his thought he kept him- 
 self at the point where art, which differentiates 
 and individuaHzes, crosses the path of science, 
 which classifies and generalizes ; so that it has 
 often happened to me to say to him laughingly : 
 " You are creating a new method." 
 
 That which is scientifically known concerning 
 pain could be put in a few pages. That which 
 one obtains metaphysically by induction concern- 
 ing pain can be expressed in a few lines. That 
 which a poet and observer obtains for his harvest 
 through the study of pain among individuals is 
 infinite. The metaphysician and the scientist, yes, 
 even the mystic, ought to draw from that treasury 
 if they wish to enrich their facts at a single stroke. 
 Not only did my father suffer, but he has seen 
 others suffer. In that way he was able to recog- 
 nize certain domains in the realm of evil where 
 the ignorance of to-day, drawing from the sources 
 of the old biographers, is still putting the old 
 inscription " tigers and lions " on the map, that is 
 to say, hollow formulas ! 
 
 One day when I was explaining to him the cross- 
 ing of the new fibres in the brain and spinal cord, 
 he cried out: "Plato's team!" Thus was imagi- 
 nation in touch with reality. That is the tendency 
 which I remark in all his notes on suffering. In 
 one place he compares those whom paralysis has 
 stricken to satyrs changed into trees or to pet- 
 rified dryads. In another place he sighs : " I 
 might date the beginning of my pain as that de- 
 lightful Mile. Lespinasse dated her love — from 
 
 7
 
 98 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 every instant of my life ! " Or else it might happen 
 that he said with gentle irony: "For hypochon- 
 dria read ignorance on the part of doctors." 
 
 What becomes of pride in the person who 
 suffers, what become of tenderness and of charity, 
 whither go the lively passions, luxuriousness and 
 hatred? How does the life of a family change its 
 aspects, the relations between the married people, 
 beween father and children and friends? How 
 do people habituate themselves to evil and resign 
 themselves? or what revolt is there against it, and 
 what form does that revolt take? and in conse- 
 quence of what efforts? These are just so many 
 troublesome questions which he answers with an 
 absolute frankness in accordance with his hard 
 experience or which he allows to remain in doubt, 
 if that is his mood. The variations themselves in 
 this same mood he passes in review with a re- 
 signed philosophy all his own, and it is wonderful 
 to see how through his will power he resists and 
 opposes to every attack all the resources of a 
 hard-headed morality. 
 
 I can still see him seated in the little garden of 
 the Hotel Mas at Lamalou surrounded by sick 
 people, preaching energy to them, reassuring the 
 nervous ones, taking pains with the despairing and 
 giving them glimpses of some possible holding-off 
 or drawing-back of their fate : " The doctors don't 
 know any more than we ; they know even less 
 than we do, because their knowledge is made up 
 of an average drawn from observations which are 
 generally hasty and incomplete, and because every
 
 As Father and as Husband. 99 
 
 case is a new and peculiar one. You, Sir, have 
 this symptom, you yonder have another. It would 
 be necessary to join you both to Madame here, 
 in order to obtain something which resembles 
 somewhat my own martyrdom. There are a great 
 many different kinds of instruments belonging to 
 the hangman ; if they do not scare you too much, 
 examine them carefully. It is with our tortures 
 as with shadows. Attention clears them up and 
 drives them off. Let us change a bit the beautiful 
 verses by Hugo : 
 
 "• II n'est point de douleur, comme il n'est point d'alg&bre 
 Qui r^siste au milieu des Hres ou des cieux 
 A la fixit^ calme et profonde des yeux.' " 
 
 "Come now, just watch me; I am talking; I 
 say oh ! ah ! ow ! and my talk is a great solace to 
 myself. Whilevvarming others I warm myself. . . . 
 It is all right — since those among you who have a 
 family which they love consider their disease as a 
 sort of lightning-rod. Destiny has satisfied its 
 hatred in them. Avoid egotism ; it increases 
 suffering; it renders suffering atrocious and more 
 unbearable. Don't open those big books ; you will 
 never get anything out of them except terror, for 
 they never treat of any but extreme cases. The 
 frightened face of Diafoirus will be enough if you 
 present to him some unpublished symptom * which 
 cannot be found in the dictionary.' The surprise 
 on the part of the doctor is so amusing to me that 
 I would like to invent such words. But it will not 
 do to push the thing too far, for then they treat
 
 lOO Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 you as a ' malade imaginaire ' and they cease to 
 feel sorry for you. Now we people of the South 
 who are here in a majority, we like to be worried 
 over; Moliere saw that very clearly when he came 
 to P6z6nas. 
 
 " Argan is Orgon pronounced in the Proven9al 
 way, and Orgon is found in the character of Tar- 
 tufife. They ought to play the Malade Imagi- 
 naire with the accent of the South ; that would 
 furnish an irresistibly comic spectacle." 
 
 With such discourses and many others and with 
 his own example and courage my father was wont 
 to enliven the wretched people in that sorrowful 
 country which, when he retired to his room, he 
 compared to the inferno of Dante, because one 
 could find there specimens of every kind of pun- 
 ishment. And that action in a twofold way of the 
 observer and consoler is a faithful image of his 
 nature. 
 
 One can readily understand that he was inter- 
 ested in famous sufferers of former days. He knew 
 fundamentally the maladies of Pascal and of Rous- 
 seau and of Montaigne as well as that of Henri 
 Heine nearer his day. But he was very careful 
 not to take up wild hypotheses like those which 
 our psychologists have seized upon ; for example, 
 the likening of genius to madness made him shrug 
 his shoulders. 
 
 A continued theme with him was the alliance 
 between pity and pain : " He who has never felt 
 hunger and never been cold, he who has never 
 suffered can talk neither about the cold, nor hunger,
 
 As Father and as Husband. loi 
 
 nor suffering. . He does not even know very well 
 what bread is, nor what is fire, nor what is resigna- 
 tion. In the first part of my life I made the ac- 
 quaintance of misery; in the second, of pain. 
 Thus my senses became sharpened — if I should 
 say to what point sharpened, no one would believe 
 me. A single face in distress at the corner of the 
 street has upset my soul and will never leave my 
 memory. There are certain intonations which I 
 avoid recalling lest I should cry like a fool. Oh, 
 those actors ! What genius is necessary to them 
 in order to reproduce that which they have expe- 
 rienced. No trembling, no exaggeration . . . and 
 then the right accent — that wonderful right accent 
 — which comes from the vitals ! " 
 
 Moreover any false note in an intonation, every 
 attempt at second-rate pathos, every philanthropi- 
 cal masquerade — all " honored ladies " and " worthy 
 sirs" uttered in what he called a "throaty" voice 
 exasperated him. I have seen tactless persons who 
 knew he was charitable boasting in his presence of 
 sacrifices and imaginary benefactions. Irony began 
 to stir in his eyes which suddenly became black 
 and brilliant. He cut the hypocrite short by some 
 disconcerting exclamation, or else he expressed 
 his disbelief with a malignant sweetness which 
 delighted every one. 
 
 Readers of his books need only recall the por- 
 traits of Argenton, Madame Hautmann and of 
 Astier Rehu, but, as he said, the most complete 
 figures of romance lack the " moisture of reality." 
 
 We are in the landau. The sky is clear. On
 
 I02 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 the edge of the turnpike sits a ragged fellow with 
 a mean face, no linen, eyes full of anger and weari- 
 ness. The magnificence of nature sparkles and 
 gleams about this vagabond as if to exasperate 
 his distress. Willy-nilly, we must stop ; my father 
 is not able to get out of the carriage, but he talks 
 to the man whilst I hand over the alms of the 
 " rich gentleman." And he asks questions in a 
 familiar way, with a kindliness and so clear an ex- 
 pression of a wish to excuse the disproportion of 
 things, that the hollow face softens and relaxes. 
 
 We go on. Then says my gentle friend: 
 " These horses, the coachman, the carriage, every- 
 thing is arranged so that one can pass quickly; 
 everything combats charity, everything is in a state 
 of virtuous indignation against the tramp. There 
 it is, that is fortune ! One cannot see the poor 
 from the cushions of the landau; they form part 
 of another world, and those favored by fortune 
 turn their heads aside. But in the glare of the un- 
 fortunate one hatred accumulates. . . . Nothing 
 is lost in this world . . . just as in chemistry." 
 
 Among the works he had in preparation one of 
 the most important, for which he had many frag- 
 ments and a general plan, was La Caravane. 
 The thread of the book is a journey in a trap made 
 by two couples who are friends, men and women 
 of opposite character and lively intelligence, be- 
 tween whom a drama of passion and jealousy 
 unrolls itself whilst they are traversing the finest 
 landscapes of France. My father knew and 
 admired the principal sections of our land in all
 
 As Father and as Husband. 103 
 
 their diversity. He always insisted upon the in- 
 fluence of the soil and local habits ; a devotee of 
 tradition in his soul, although a revolutionist on 
 other sides, he extolled in conversation the mar- 
 vellous views of Brittany, Normandy, Touraine, 
 Alsatia, the Ardeche, the Lyonnais, Bourgogne, 
 Provence and Languedoc. He had made a pro- 
 found study of characters according to district. 
 
 His first question of a stranger or a beginner 
 was: "Where were you born?" As soon as he 
 was informed he sought through his vast memory 
 for the dominating points of the region. From hav- 
 ing made researches into his own origin he had 
 constructed a method. Changes of temperament 
 along a given river or a given valley excited his 
 curiosity to the highest degree : " The Norman 
 is the Gascon of the North." — "Lorraine finesse is 
 a clear and sometimes dry observatiojj of men and 
 events." — "You must not confound Provence with 
 the stony South, the Herault and Languedoc. 
 Provence has a touch of Italy, but H6rault and 
 Languedoc prepare one for Spain." — " The logical 
 imagination of the Touraine country (Rabelais, 
 Descartes) differs profoundly from the intellectual 
 wine of Bourgogne and from the Mediterranean 
 flash-in-the-pan." — "Anger of a woman, anger 
 of the Mediterranean ; all on the surface. Ten 
 feet of calm water under one foot of foam ! " — 
 " Panurge, the type of the Parisian, has not 
 changed since Gargantna. I have him, exactly 
 like himself, in at least ten of my comrades ! " — 
 " The lie in the North, heavy, tenacious and
 
 T04 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 gloomy, is very different from otir lie, which runs 
 about, changes a subject, laughs, gesticulates — 
 and ends all of a sudden in sincerity." 
 
 He had a very significant " schedule " for the 
 city of Lyons which he saw much of in his youth 
 and for the Lyons temperament : " The two 
 banks — Fourvieres and Croix-Rousse — the two 
 rivers, the Saone and the Rhone, mystics and camits 
 (silk-weavers). A tendency to general ideas on the 
 one side: Ballanche, Blanc-Saint- Bonnet ; and on 
 the other the taste for jewelry : Josephine Soulary. 
 On this side Puvis de Chavannes, on the other 
 Meissonier. This parallel might be carried on 
 among the scientific minds." 
 
 " Instead of losing themselves in volumes of 
 verse which no one reads, why do not sincere men, 
 who are friends of the real, carefully write the his- 
 tory of the cprner which they inhabit and enjoy. 
 The novel form lends itself admirably to this. 
 Customs, legends, that which strikes the infant 
 mind, the part which forest, mountain or village 
 play in the popular imagination, or that of child- 
 hood ; that which remains from ancient times ; 
 that which has not yet been absolutely levelled. I 
 do not ask'^hat every village shall have its Mistral; 
 the great poet is rare. But conscientious souls are 
 not lacking who might do this admirable business. 
 We should be stupefied at the intellectual and 
 moral riches of France. They form a treasure 
 which is wasted, all these customs, dialects and 
 stories. Oh, how fine are the Gascon tales by 
 Blasi !
 
 As Father and as Husband. 105 
 
 A book of that kind on the Perigord country 
 compactly enough written delighted him ; it was 
 recommended to him by his friend Senator Dusso- 
 lier. I can no longer remember the title ; it was 
 something like Le Moulin dti Fran. He praised it 
 to all his friends. He lent it to me. It is a com- 
 plete work in which the author gives himself up 
 completely and relates all about his little country 
 with a prodigious care for the truth. 
 
 "Why don't they imitate him?" cried my 
 father. " I follow with delight the consequences 
 of the impulsion which our Mistral gave. And if 
 Mistral has wrought in the poetical domain, 
 Drumont has wrought in the social domain. The 
 profound feeling of his boldness is of the same 
 kind. A return to tradition ! That is what may 
 save us in this contemporary dissolution of things. 
 I have always had the instinct for things of this 
 sort; but they have not appeared to me clearly 
 until within a few years, thanks to the efforts of 
 my great friends. It is bad to lose one's roots 
 entirely and forget one's village. 
 
 " That life Maillane led, what an ideal ! Not 
 only to cultivate one's garden and vine, but to 
 celebrate them also, and add to legendry by glory, 
 renewing the linked chain of friendships. It is 
 very singular that poetry only attaches itself to 
 objects that have come from a distance or are of 
 very long usage. That which people call progress 
 — a vague and very doubtful word — rouses or 
 excites the lower parts of the intelligence. The 
 higher parts vibrate better to that which has
 
 io6 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 touched and inflamed a long series of imagina- 
 tions that have issued one from the other and 
 are strengthened by the sight of the same land- 
 scapes, the smell of the same fragrances, the touch 
 of the same polished furniture. 
 
 " Very old impressions settle down to the very 
 bottom of an obscure memory, that memory of 
 the race which the crowd of individual memories 
 weave together. The old impressions unite them- 
 selves with all the efforts of laborers, vineyard 
 tenders and foresters. It is with them as with 
 the roots which worm their way along and mix 
 themselves with the nourishing earth, twist them- 
 selves together and mix their juices. Didactic 
 poems on steam, electricity and the X-rays are 
 not pbems at all. Oh, I guess already the excep- 
 tion which will be objected ; the singer of the 
 future will be mentioned, the sublime American, 
 lyrical Walt Whitman ! But he belongs to the 
 country without ancestors." 
 
 That was one of his habitual themes. He de- 
 veloped it with a vigor and richness of images 
 quite incomparable, for all his feelings were 
 brought into play. The love of " his Provence " 
 rose to his lips. 
 
 " Leon, I 'd have you know that I am the ven- 
 dor of happiness myself When some young man 
 comes to see me in his arrogant or timid way, 
 with his little volume in his hand, I say to him: 
 
 ' From what part of the country? ' ' From , 
 
 Sir.' ' A long time since you have left your 
 house and the old people?' 'About so long.'
 
 As Father and as Husband, 107 
 
 ' Are you thinking of returning? ' * T don't know.' 
 ' But why not right away, now that you have had 
 a taste of Paris? Are they poor?' ' Oh, no, Sir, 
 they are comfortably off.' * Then, hapless one, 
 flee ! I see you there, undecided, young and 
 impressionable. I do not believe that there is 
 actually in you that energy of Balzac which boiled 
 up and fermented in his garret. Listen to my 
 counsel and later you will thank me. Return to 
 your home. Make a solitude to yourself in some 
 corner of the house or the farm. Stroll back 
 through your memories; recollections of child- 
 hood are the living and unpoisoned source for all 
 those who have not the master's power of evoking 
 thought. Besides, you will see. You have plenty 
 of time. Make the people who are about you 
 talk, the hunters and village girls, the old men 
 and vagabonds, and let all that gradually settle in 
 your mind. Then, if you have any talent, you 
 will write a personal book which will have your 
 own mark on it and will, in the first place, interest 
 your comrades and then the public, if you are 
 able, or if you have the chance, to find some odd 
 piece of intrigue, well carried out, to put inside 
 this frame.' " 
 
 " But, father, it must be very seldom that the 
 young man will listen to you ! He thinks that 
 you are jealous of his future glory; he has his 
 answer ready : ' But you yourself. Sir, never acted 
 in this manner, and you have not fared very 
 badly.' " 
 
 He smiled, thought a moment, knocked the
 
 io8 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 ashes from his pipe, and answered : " Some of 
 them have listened to me. The example of Bap- 
 tiste Bonnet may be cited, the author of that Vie 
 d' Enfant, which will be continued in two more 
 volumes and I hope as successfully as the first. 
 Bonnet has shown himself an admirable poet 
 merely by recounting what he found right before 
 his eyes ; his eyes are those of an observant 
 lyrical talent. Imagine what the sketch of a novel 
 or poem in French would have been from his 
 hand, in French, which he understands very badly, 
 and moreover on a subject which did not spring 
 from his own heart ! Yes, I can cite Bonnet and 
 many others. The vendor of happiness is not an 
 obstinate fellow carried away by theory. From 
 those who have had the pleasure of travel and 
 sojourn in foreign lands he asks an account of 
 their impressions. Profit by the inestimable op- 
 portunity which has filled your mind with new 
 sounds and colors and odors ! There is poor little 
 Boissiere, now dead, whose thought, in his only 
 book, Fumeurs d' Opium, gave warrant of a great 
 mind. 
 
 " Bonnetain too has known how to take advan- 
 tage of his trip round the globe. It is quite true 
 that Lot! is an author of great talent, but he has 
 not closed the path for other navigators and 
 dreamers. And as to those who glorify the land 
 of their birth, here is Rodenbach, the most ex- 
 quisite and refined of poets and prose writers, 
 moist and dripping with his Flemish fogs, a 
 writer whose sentence has the tender effect of
 
 As Father and as Husband. 109 
 
 belfries against the sky and the soft golden hue of 
 reliquaries and stained-glass windows. 
 
 " There is Pouvillon, to whom we owe the 
 complete description of the Montalban district, 
 so full of charm. Examples are numberless. 
 Whether nomadic or stationary, let them all make 
 their work conform to their own likings and let 
 them chant that which has enchanted them." 
 
 " We are not far off from La Caravanc. 
 Such conversations make the days of travellers a 
 delight ; they are held at the bend of the road 
 before the grounds of some old chateau while twi- 
 light lends to nature restfulness and calm and the 
 servants prepare the meal. According to his 
 own character each person in the party becomes 
 the sponsor for some theory in conformity with his 
 own moral nature. The subjects of conversation 
 are brought in by the chance sight of things 
 without, as it happens when we allow our thoughts 
 to run delightfully hither and thither. 
 
 " But," added my father, " I would not per- 
 mit them to philosophize long and fatigue the 
 reader; their opinions must follow the same curve 
 as their adventures. I do not want any puppets 
 crammed with phrases and stories; the blood 
 must circulate." 
 
 When by chance the vendor of happiness talked 
 about politics, he made a grand argument con- 
 cerning the underhand but constant warfare 
 between Paris and the Provinces. Some years 
 ago Mme. Adam, my dear " patroness," for 
 whom my father entertained a warm gratitude
 
 no Alp house Daudet. 
 
 because of her kindness in my regard, had an 
 idea of transforming the Noiivelle Revue. My 
 father admired her greatly for her " divining 
 quaHties," her gift of prophecy, her ardent pat- 
 riotism and those many and lofty quahties which 
 place her in the first rank of Frenchwomen. 
 
 Knowing the sagacity of her friend Daudet with 
 regard to everything connected with periodicals 
 and newspapers, she addressed herself to him. 
 He was categorical in his reply: 
 
 " My dear and illustrious friend, I myself 
 have pondered long the idea of establishing a 
 Revue de Champrosay, in the management of 
 which I think I should have the necessary tact to 
 distribute the work according to the powers of 
 each one who contributed. 
 
 " You cannot be unaware that one of the gravest 
 contemporary questions is the latent antagonism 
 between France and the Provinces. That showed 
 itself very energetically in 1870; and after the war 
 the enmity of the village churches toward Notre- 
 Dame, the memories of the siege and that strange 
 and memorable separation between the heart and 
 the blood-vessels, all these rancors were continued. 
 You can still perceive certain echoes of this in the 
 polemics of the provincial press, that press which 
 has been ruined by the telegraph and the quick 
 distribution of news." 
 
 lean recall very well the turn of the conversation 
 and the general sense of the interview, but 1 am 
 powerless to reproduce the picturesque army of 
 arguments, the lightning flash from his eyes, his
 
 As Father and as Husband. 1 1 1 
 
 charming smile and the elaborate gestures made 
 by the hand which still held his pen. 
 
 " It is not necessary to inform you, dear friend, 
 what very considerable resources the Provinces 
 contain, material and moral resources, if I may 
 talk like a Deputy ; but what we both of us feel 
 much more vividly than any parliament man you 
 please is the necessity of giving a little air and 
 life to the members which the head is by way of 
 fatiguing and ruining. 
 
 " Decentralization is one of those big words which 
 say nothing to the mind. Armed with your idea, 
 you have a weapon at hand. The professors of the 
 universities, those well-taught and well-informed 
 journalists whom one finds on the actual press of 
 the provinces will answer to your appeal. In that 
 way you will continue in your office a sort oi Revue 
 Fedh'aliste, in which you will print complaints 
 from the districts, in which, without taking sides 
 in their village squabbles, you can keep yourself 
 in touch with those quarrels. 
 
 " While you are talking of the trade and indus- 
 tries of this place and the other, of agriculture and 
 the harvest, of 'waters and forests,' thanks to your 
 activity and constantly continued effort, you may 
 perhaps succeed in re-establishing the communi- 
 cations so unfortunately cut between the hurried 
 minds of Parisians and the slower and often more 
 serious intelligences of the provinces; in our 
 France, you know, when a single spark glimmers, 
 very soon there is fire everywhere." 
 
 On the spot Mme. Adam organized a series of
 
 TI2 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 clever inspectors, who were sent to provincial 
 functionaries and others of greater note, and at 
 this day an important section of the Noin'cUe 
 Revue acts as a rally-point and editorial chair for 
 utterances which one never heard before. At that 
 very moment I was commissioned to write the 
 opening article, " Paris and the Provinces," which 
 in a certain sense I wrote under paternal dictation. 
 
 There is no doubt that as my father grew older 
 he would have carried out his project of the 
 Champrosay Review. 
 
 He was not like a great many of his contem- 
 poraries who revile the press and are ever ready 
 to ask services from it. By as much as he dis- 
 dained advertisement, self-advertisement, by so 
 much would he interest himself in those different 
 kinds of information which in a few years have 
 changed the whole physiognomy of the big dail- 
 ies ; and though among his friends he had polem- 
 ical writers like Rochefort and Drumont, he 
 admired the spirit of order and organization in 
 Mme. Adam, that universal knowledge, that power 
 of action which stupefy every one who approaches 
 the great woman patriot. He was never happier 
 than when those " cursed politics " permitted his 
 old comrade Adrien Hebrard to come and chat 
 with him. 
 
 What contests of laughter did not these two 
 Provencals indulge in, completely informed as 
 they were as to many men and many events, and 
 having acquired in their long lives such experi- 
 ence ! And nevertheless, without any bitterness !
 
 As Father and as Husband. 113 
 
 Those who are now on the summit as well as the 
 most ordinary reporters, whom he received with 
 his usual courtesy and friendly ease, can be called 
 in as witnesses to his sagacity and his delicate 
 " scent." 
 
 No one better than he might divine the taste 
 and whims and changing humor of the public. 
 No one had better studied the changes in the 
 " reading crowd " which is by no means the same 
 thing as the active and noisy crowd. He was a 
 partisan for the complete liberty of the press — 
 "that wonderful safety valve for secrets." He 
 used to say : " In France there can be no govern- 
 ment capable of suppressing the written word ; 
 every effort made in this direction, just as we saw 
 during the Empire, will only end by strengthen- 
 ing irony, putting allusions in fetters and doubling 
 and tripling the wonderful power of the ' iron 
 nib.' " 
 
 " We could hardly believe nowadays what a 
 universal stupor was occasioned by the terrible 
 article from Rochefort on the death of Victor 
 Noir — that thunderclap framed in mourning, 
 which transformed and petrified the whole capital 
 into a multitude of motionless figures, reading and 
 weighing the virulence of each sentence." 
 
 He took no part in Boulangism because he 
 never got enthusiastic until he had made for him- 
 self a clear and independent opinion ; but he felt 
 some interest in that movement, as a " combina- 
 tion of a suppressed anti-parliamentary disorder 
 with a patriotic impulse." He was indignant at
 
 1 14 Alphonse DaudeL 
 
 the judgment delivered by the High Court of 
 Justice which condemned Rochefort to exile for 
 articles in the newspapers: " It is the low revenge 
 of men without cleverness, of vulgar politicians, 
 directed against a writer of infinite brilliancy. 
 They pretend to disdain that pamphleteer who 
 was nevertheless one of the first originators of the 
 actual government under which they are waxing 
 fat; but they fear him quite enough to order him 
 into banishment. They will pay dearly for that 
 infamous deed ! " The Panama scandal undertook 
 to realize this prediction. 
 
 At home he and I used to joke at the eager- 
 ness with which each of us tried to get the news- 
 papers away from each other early in the morning. 
 He read the papers with remarkable quickness; 
 nothing that was important escaped him. He 
 could not resist the pleasure of writing at once 
 a word of congratulation to the author of some 
 article which pleased him. He remembered new 
 names. In the papers as in books he warmed 
 toward every appearance of talent. He wanted 
 to see the writer, make him talk, aid him from his 
 earliest beginnings. It sometimes happened that 
 he reversed the roles and a reporter sent to re- 
 ceive his own confession was put by him in the 
 confessional. 
 
 Many who are famous to-day will recall his 
 encouragements and the genial way in which he 
 reassured timidity: "It is part of the role of the 
 vendor of happiness to give good counsel to 
 smaller comrades. When I receive one of these
 
 As Father and as Husband. 1 1 5 
 
 young men who with difficulty gain their bread at 
 so much a line, I recall my own beginning and 
 reflect that perhaps I have before me a man of 
 the future, a real talent." He gave similar coun- 
 sel to all : " This trade which you are at, and which 
 disgusts you, will be of service to you later; by 
 its aid you will have penetrated into many homes 
 and learned to understand characters not a few 
 and played a part in various comedies. Infor- 
 mation for the public such as exists to-day did 
 not have its origin in New York or Chicago. It 
 sprang from the realistic novel. It corresponds 
 to that need of sincerity which fills men's minds 
 more and more." 
 
 When his words had been dictated or reported 
 amiss, he would say indulgently: " Historians, the 
 most severe of them and those surest of themselves, 
 often make mistakes 1 Why should not this young 
 man have made a mistake? Truth is a terrible, 
 fleeing goddess. Everything that is in the nar- 
 rator's inside, everything that is subjective in him, 
 from his passions to his vision, down to a boot that 
 is too tight, wars against his desire to be a faithful 
 witness. Consider the smallest fact, the slenderest 
 episode and observe how in one single second it 
 changes its form ! Note how it takes an entirely 
 diff"erent air in the mouth of one person or another ! 
 Remember that symbolical story by Edgar Poe of 
 the double assassination and the multiform inter- 
 pretations made by the spectators." 
 
 It was one of his whims to distribute beforehand 
 the various lines of work on the Revue de Champ-
 
 Ii6 AlpJionse Dmidet. 
 
 rosay : " It shall be called the Champrosay Re- 
 view because I shall not subject myself to the 
 pressure of Paris, nor the optical angle of Paris. I 
 shall endeavor to classify events according to their 
 real importance. I shall confide reports from the 
 law courts to such a one as possesses good eyes 
 and judgment and style in his writing; and the 
 Chamber of Deputies to such another who has the 
 faculty of the humorist. 
 
 " Many writers lose their force in imaginative 
 fiction and stories who would acquire an unexpected 
 vigor if they were supported by reality. Par- 
 ticularly I would wish that my Review should be 
 alive and impress the reader with the feeling of an 
 active organism. I would like to pay my fellow 
 workers generously in order to relieve them from 
 anxiety as to money and be able to demand great 
 things of them. I would give an opening to the 
 utterance of every eloquent opinion." 
 
 He then passed in review the unexploited riches 
 and treasures of information and anecdotes which 
 exist in the industries and various branches of 
 trade — the features of the different quarters of the 
 city, the confessions of humble folk and what the 
 chestnut vendor has to say. " I would see to it 
 that in each number there should be a well-founded 
 inquiry into some injustice, some great wrong and 
 abuse of power, and in order to have my hands 
 free I should pay my railway and theatre tickets 
 out of my own pocket." 
 
 He was prevented from realizing his project, at 
 first through his illness, and then because of his
 
 As Father and as Husband. 1 1 7 
 
 work itself, which entirely exhausted his power for 
 labor and rendered impossible any farther care 
 which made oversight and direction necessary. He 
 was compelled to be content with following the 
 efforts of others. Jean Finot was quite aware of 
 the interest he took in the Revue des Revues and 
 in those singular explorations and generous cam- 
 paigns of his in favor of the Armenians. 
 
 In the obituary notices accounts have been 
 given how my father at the suggestion of Finot had 
 the joy of saving the life of an illustrious author in 
 the Orient who was a prisoner to the Turks and 
 was just about to be executed. On that occasion 
 he did not get up a manifesto with a great amount 
 of advertisement, all of which would have been 
 noisy and vain. He preferred direct and discreet 
 action, for which the compatriots of the unhappy 
 man, who is now alive, entertain in memory of him 
 the greatest gratitude. It must be said, certainly, 
 that Europe has not spoiled them ! 
 
 My father had promised the Revue de Paris a 
 study of human customs entitled Fifteen Years of 
 Marriage, which would have been the summing 
 up of his experience as a husband and father. The 
 little group which forms the family had particularly 
 enlisted his attention : " The ordinary circumstances 
 of life, the humblest and oftenest performed, are 
 also those that are the least studied. Aside from 
 Montaigne, Diderot and Rousseau, I have always 
 been struck by the disdain which superior intellects 
 have exhibited toward that which I will call the 
 ' small change of existence.' An admirable subject,
 
 Ii8 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 if there ever was one ! Balzac has written Le 
 Central de Mariage and L Interdiction. The 
 drama of inheritance is complete in his works. 
 
 He had in mind to write a pathology of social 
 bodies. Why should the philosopher elude in 
 that way familiar problems which perhaps are the 
 most difficult of all? He said to my brother 
 and me : 
 
 " I have never gone contrary to your wishes or 
 interfered with your somersaults or those changes 
 of mind in young people which are sometimes very 
 difficult to follow — changes which make grave 
 men indignant. You must know that I have 
 pondered over the rights and duties of a father of a 
 family. At what line does his power end? Within 
 what limits can he exercise that power? " 
 
 Every day we had reason to feel the benefit of 
 the largeness of his ideas. We gave ourselves up 
 to him completely without any drawback and with- 
 out false modesty. We threw ourselves on his in- 
 dulgence ; no confession was too dearly bought 
 for us. Reprimand he used very little. Upon 
 hearing of one of my follies he still preserved his 
 tenderest smile, and then, going back in memory 
 over his past life, recited for my edification this 
 circumstance and that similar error, which he had 
 paid for in this or that way. 
 
 Above all things he had a horror of a lie : 
 "Don't try to deceive me; your eyes and tone of 
 voice betray you. How do you expect me to 
 counsel you, if you send me off on a false trail?" 
 Then he added : " As to you, my little fellows.
 
 As Father and as Husband. 119 
 
 I live again in your youth ; this prolongation of 
 life is delightful. When you rush up and kiss me 
 in a hurry, wishing to elude my sagacity, I might 
 enumerate all the tricks, one after the other, 
 wherewith you are sure that you can escape 
 from your old father. Punish yourselves ! Give 
 yourselves the necessary training ! But explain 
 to me your scruples and state your regrets and 
 tell me of those bitter embarrassments of youth 
 which cause one to bite one's pillow in the dark- 
 ness of the night with a groan." 
 
 He thought that the first duty of a father was 
 to be morally the comrade of his son. He re- 
 called with terror a moving incident in Montaigne 
 wherein old Marshal de Montluc, I think, is in a 
 state of desperation because he lost his son, and 
 never gave the poor fellow a chance to divine 
 what a passion he really had for him. 
 
 He listened patiently to all our theories, how- 
 ever extravagant, leaving the care of calming us 
 to circumstances. He seemed to be particularly 
 desirous of seeing us think for ourselves, out of 
 reach of all influences. For in the domain of in- 
 telligence he had a perfect horror of imitation: 
 " One of the most terrible statements is that made 
 by Lucretius, namely, ' that the human race exists 
 for very few persons.' 
 
 " I can remember a multitude of faces and of 
 hours spent in gossip. I could very easily draw 
 the reckoning of the new individualities and new 
 ideas ; some of them who are too easily impressed 
 repeat the lessons they have learned in books and
 
 I20 Alpho7ise Daudet. 
 
 newspapers ; others are the idols of a party or 
 of a doctrine — what followers they have ! And 
 what a delight also when one hears a sincere 
 accent! Surprises are not lacking; that man 
 there whom nobody has noted, who is lost among 
 his neighbors, suddenly enters into a ray of light, 
 starts out against the background.- and detaches 
 himself. 
 
 " On the evening of a first night the lobbies of 
 a theatre present the image of life. Each one 
 puts his neighbor to the question and fears to 
 express himself without support: 'Don't you 
 think so? . . . What is your opinion, dear mas- 
 ter? ' ... Is it not a strange thing, that not- 
 withstanding the herd, the works are classified 
 nevertheless, and a division is made into the hand- 
 some and the ugly, and well founded reputations 
 emerge? " 
 
 How many times have we not stirred up this 
 difficult problem of the artist's personality ! A 
 given man will enlist great hopes, begin with a 
 vigorous and novel work and suddenly, as though 
 he had stopped because worn out and at the 
 end of his inventiveness, write no more. The 
 intensity of the wheels that revolve in the brain 
 escapes criticism. Ver}' often reflection acts as 
 a poison, because reflection elaborates a work in 
 secret; that is why my father counselled the study 
 of nature, its forms and its shades as beyond 
 everything else. 
 
 He was nervous at thought which devours its 
 own substance : " That admirable writer has a sur-
 
 As Father and as Husband. i 2 1 
 
 prising power for destruction," said he, talking 
 of the philosopher Nietsche. The constantly 
 bitter and sarcastic form of his aphorisms also 
 repulsed him. But especially he reproached him 
 for " having never sufficiently taken the air," i. e. 
 gone to Nature for instruction. 
 
 It is only a {q\n years now that I have learned 
 to understand the depth of that doctrine which 
 forces the writer to go outside himself and not 
 lose contact with the life around one. The first 
 condition requisite to intellectual joy is the organ- 
 ization of sensations and sentiments. Weariness 
 comes quickly, if one or the other does not renew 
 itself, but allows itself to be worn to the bone. 
 That is the pitfall of analysis. 
 
 Now my father was analyzing all the time, but 
 he stopped before he became tired. He had 
 pushed his thinking machine to the highest possi- 
 ble tension. He extracted a most surprising use 
 from the smallest circumstances. That explains 
 why, in spite of his fits of illness and his suffer- 
 ings, in spite of the attacks of an implacable 
 malady, he preserved to the very end that second 
 sight and that freshness of impression which 
 caused every one who approached him to marvel. 
 
 It is quite certain that knowledge and observa- 
 tion when carried to such a degree are two grand 
 springs of happiness. The deep-lying reason for 
 this consists of the fact that one's personality 
 becomes complete and bold. One feels oneself 
 all the more ojiesclf, the greater the number of 
 problems one has tackled, and the more of those
 
 122 Alphoitse Daudet. 
 
 solutions which the mathematicians call " elegant " 
 have been found for them. In that sense " ele- 
 gance " was one of the remarkable qualities of 
 Alphonse Daudet. Moral hygiene was his pre- 
 occupation. Wounded in his body and con- 
 demned to a restricted existence, he might apply 
 all those cares to the nobler part of his spirit. 
 
 One day I complimented him on having trained 
 his imagination: "Of a certainty," answered he, 
 " I have always imposed as limits upon my imagi- 
 nation verisimilitude and virtue. I know well its 
 misty domain, those strange countries where fancy 
 is able to carry the heaviest load. But a novelist 
 should not permit himself to employ the mental 
 debauches of a lyrical writer. Besides, before 
 everything else I demand emotion and when the 
 human proportions have been overdone emotion 
 loses itself." 
 
 He was forever praising to me tact: "If you 
 wish, it is a minor quality, yet nothing is complete 
 without it. Tact alone causes that little shudder 
 which runs through the reader from head to foot 
 and, winning his confidence, hands him over to 
 the author. Literary tact ! Many a time it insists 
 upon hard sacrifices. I have been forced to slash 
 pitilessly this fine speech and that brilliant episode 
 in order to remain in measure. . . . 
 
 " But what is far better than the application of 
 any principle, no matter how good, is a gift, a 
 feeling of what is superfluous and what is neces- 
 sary, the taste for harmony and for proportion. 
 Owing to ihe complexity of our impressions, we
 
 As Father arid as Husbartd. 123 
 
 moderns have lost, it appears, that clear and Hmpid 
 observation of the ancients, that immediate real- 
 ization of a sober and perfect art. In Rabelais 
 and Montaigne, in whom humanism is mixed 
 with an intoxication that is genius, a delicate 
 flower with a Latin or Greek perfume suddenly 
 unfolds itself in the wildwood of maxims and 
 descriptions — as it were a miracle of revival. 
 With what delight does one not inhale it! How 
 one admires it ! How it lights up the page ! " 
 
 One can see how generalized were the counsels 
 which he gave to beginners in literature. That 
 was because he believed a spontaneous and indi- 
 vidual effort was the indispensable condition to 
 success : " The preachments of elderly persons 
 only serve to make people yawn with weariness. 
 Every one must win his brevet at his own expense." 
 
 A particular line in which the " vendor of 
 happiness " made his appearance was, for ex- 
 ample, the exposition of principles by the aid of 
 which we may avoid envy, tartness and bitter- 
 ness, which are parasitical plants of the literary 
 profession. 
 
 " It is certain that in my time people did not 
 devour their ancestors as they do to-day. Money, 
 dirty money, had not begun then to trouble their 
 minds, nor yet the bait of ' big editions.' That 
 is a modern scourge. People did not have any 
 ambition to reach that enormous diffusion and 
 start the rowdy-dow which now seems to be a mark 
 of success. For us success lay far more in the 
 appreciation of five or six great comrades whom
 
 124 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 we venerated than the invasion of the show- 
 cases," 
 
 At every turn he came back again to that 
 " pleasure of admiring," the charm of which :s 
 lost. The most brilhant and precious souvenirs 
 for that generation of writers were the afternoons 
 at Flaubert's. " Pshaw, we shall never sell our- 
 selves, shall we?" Emile Zola used to say with 
 a touch of melancholy. But regrets vanished at 
 the sound of the " fine thunder " which rolled 
 about all sorts of discussions — a tumult of ideas 
 and words. Silent and " hard to read," Tour- 
 gu^neff sat by himself in a corner, keeping his 
 actual impressions for himself alone, but esteemed 
 by all. Not until after his death were they to 
 know what his impressions were, and then they 
 made men sad. 
 
 Maupassant already showed himself timidly and 
 Flaubert was boasting of his first attempts. There 
 were also several scientists, such as the illustrious 
 Pouchet from the museum, who in that society 
 played the role of Berthelot at the Magny dinner. 
 
 I have often heard Goncourt or my father regret 
 these warm-hearted meetings in which the word 
 " confraternity " had a meaning and in which the 
 philosophy of passing events ran the gauntlet of 
 half a dozen powerfiil brains, which contact with 
 one another and the desire to shine roused to 
 fever heat: "We kept the best of ourselves for 
 those meetings. One would think to himself: I 
 shall tell them this ; or else, I shall read that page 
 and take their advice on it. No truckling, no
 
 As Father and as Husband. 125 
 
 servility ! Neither pupils nor masters, but com- 
 rades; respectful to the older men, warming 
 themselves in the reflection of their glory and 
 proving by their choice that in our profession 
 there is something else beside money and vanity." 
 I recalled all this at the cemetery of Pere La- 
 chaise on a pallid and sorrowful winter day, the 
 while that Emile Zola said farewell to his old friend 
 in a few sublime words. Let people discuss as 
 much as they will concerning romanticism or nat- 
 uralism, concerning the usefulness or the defects of 
 schools, that was a fine literary review which united 
 in the same enthusiasms Gustave Flaubert, Ivan 
 Tourguenefif, Emile Zola, Edmond de Goncourt, 
 Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Gustave 
 Toudouze and a few others. 
 
 That was no cenaculum where disappointed 
 ambitions meet to dine, that was no scandal shop 
 where absentees are torn to pieces. And when 
 Flaubert died I can still see the sorrow they all felt ; 
 a {t.\N days before there had been a reunion of the 
 faithful at Croisset, a little literary picnic, from 
 which they returned delighted. Similarly I recall 
 the week that preceded the death of my father 
 and the dinner in memory of Balzac, organized to 
 renew the fine traditions of old. There were Zola, 
 Barras, Anatole France, Bourget and my father; 
 it was a cordial and charming meeting. Among 
 many subjects that of death was spoken of. Bour- 
 get recalled the fact that in his last moments Taine 
 had asked to have a page of Sainte-Beuve read to 
 him " in order to hear somethinof that was clear."
 
 126 
 
 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 There was a unanimous admiration to be noted 
 among them for the great critic of Port-Royal, the 
 writer of the Lundis. As we were returning in the 
 carriage, happy and excited, my father said to me : 
 " Such love-feasts are indispensable. They whip 
 the spirit up, they beautify things. By exchanging 
 ideas we penetrate each other's brains. We see 
 the same fact and same episode appreciated in all 
 kinds of ways in accordance with the characters 
 and habits of the different men. Poor little dinner ! 
 I thought of my Goncourt ! He will soon make 
 himself clear'' 
 
 During the dinner a eulogy was uttered over 
 Cherbuliez, whom one of us had made a resolve 
 regularly to imitate in the future. All of us vene- 
 rated the modesty of that great writer, who has 
 prosecuted his labors consistently and written so 
 many remarkable pages without ranging himself 
 under any banner: "Thus you see," murmured 
 my father, " that no effort is lost. Those who rep- 
 resent our humanity as an unrest like the swarming 
 of an ant-heap tell a lie. This evening we spoke 
 with one voice in attestation of the power and au- 
 thority of him to whom we owe Ladislas Bclski, 
 Comte Kostia and twenty magnificent novels." 
 
 According to Alphonse Daudet, in order to reach 
 happiness there was but one path only, that of 
 o<jos^ justice. 
 
 I am here closest yet to the heart which I have 
 endeavored to unveil to you. I can affirm that the 
 sense of justice was the most certain and most 
 vivid stimulus for the talent of my father — if
 
 As Father and as Husband. 127 
 
 indeed genius is made up of excessive sentiments 
 which come into accord with each other through 
 the privilege of a harmonious nature, and if the 
 art of writing comes from the fact that these senti- 
 ments set in motion vigorous and picturesque words 
 and put to work a corresponding verbal force, and 
 if moreover, between the convictions which the 
 brain sets in order and those movements of the 
 hand that fix their formulas on paper, there are 
 direct and profound paths of connection. 
 
 If moral qualities affect even the form itself, I 
 may add without fear of mistake that my father 
 had the literary style of justice. 
 
 The very smallest episodes of life show him pas- 
 sionately interested in what is true, an irreconcil- 
 able adversary of what is false. No one recognized 
 his own errors better than he and no one ac- 
 knowledged more readily that he made mistakes. 
 He was constantly repeating: " It would be a 
 martyrdom to me to insist upon holding an in- 
 iquitous opinion." In the many questions that 
 arise in a family he was taken as the judge. He 
 seated himself " beneath the oak," that is to say, 
 he listened and weighed the complaints with ex- 
 treme patience, turning and twisting his pen or his 
 eyeglass, his face gently inclined, sometimes with 
 a sudden smile in his look. 
 
 Once being completely informed, he pondered 
 a few seconds, and then, without solemnity, but 
 with a grave gentleness which impressed one, he 
 gave his advice and explained his reasons. It was 
 very rarely that he did not convince. I have tried
 
 128 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 to give some account to myself for his instant 
 action on the mind of a young man as violent as I 
 was, one so often blinded by self-interest. 
 
 I discovered two reasons, one instinctive and the 
 other moral; the first is the sound of his enchant- 
 ing voice, which was such as one could hardly 
 imagine; and I was not the only one to submit to 
 its charm. It had so many inflections and such 
 gentle ones that it seemed as if several persons, all 
 of whom were dear to you, were addressing you, 
 each one with a particular accent. 
 
 The second reason is a suppleness of mind which 
 allowed him to enter into the views of the man 
 whom he wished to persuade, merge himself in 
 his nature and so lead him to the wisest results by 
 pathways on which they gradually met. That is 
 the quality which produces the great romancer, 
 the creator of types. At the bottom of every 
 genius there is seductiveness. 
 
 That is the way I explained to myself the dis- 
 like my father had for the platform. His energy 
 was one the farthest possible removed from the. 
 orator's art. No artifice, no hypocrisy ! He could 
 win over a single mind ; he could not persuade a 
 crowd. For a crowd some such speech is neces- 
 sary as that by Antony in Shakespeare's y?i/i?(s 
 Ccssar, which we many a time perused without 
 exhausting our admiration. 
 
 Another speech is more fitting to the individual 
 — for instance, that which Agrippa d'Aubign6 re- 
 ports in such a splendid way as uttered by Admiral 
 Coligny, the speech he made at night to his trem-
 
 As Father and as Husband. 1 29 
 
 bling wife, both of them in bed, whilst the tocsin 
 of the massacres was sounding. 
 
 There again I find the Christian mark in my 
 father. The rehgion that inculcates pardon and 
 sacrifice substituted through the confessional an- 
 other form of action for the eloquence of the 
 ancients, a form better adapted to that individ- 
 ualism which may be discovered in its germs in 
 the sermons of Jesus. Without a public or the 
 prestige of distinction to aid one, the problem is 
 to influence people person to person and convince 
 their minds. The more numerous the auditors /VUr^i^ Vt-«. 
 whom the words address, the vaguer nmst those -'tfcx. Cl^a-c 
 words be. 't^ -^rc^y 
 
 By addressing a small number, speech becomes Ajr-T^-x.JUi. 
 particularized and increases its chance of being 
 more exact than it would be otherwise. 
 
 Alphonse Daudet had made a profound study 
 of vanity. 
 
 " Although pride is a lever which lifts the entire 
 individual and stops at nothing, vanity diminishes 
 conscientiousness. Pride, which is a tension of 
 living forces, may exasperate justice or brutally 
 tear it from the heart; but vanity destroys it 
 underhand. Insinuating and not to be grappled 
 with, vanity glides into the secret folds of our 
 nature and afifects the least visible causes of our 
 action. Very often we ask ourselves why a certain 
 man has acted contrary to his character and with 
 such extraordinary bad tact. It is because he has 
 yielded to the power of vanity, the most experi- 
 enced and crafty of masters." 
 
 9
 
 130 Alphoiise Daiidet. 
 
 Not seldom did it happen that some fact was 
 observed in current Hfe to corroborate his conver- 
 sations on ethics, offering him a demonstration 
 as in a picture. Among his acquaintances my 
 father possessed one type of the Vain Man. 
 
 " He is coming to-day ; try to be present. We 
 will make him trot. It 's one of his happy days, 
 we may hope to get some remarkable phrases — 
 some of the phrases which spring involuntarily 
 from the ruling passion, like those which Balzac 
 used to find to suit his dramatic moments." 
 
 The bell rang. It was the Vain Man. Even 
 before he sat down he began at once to entertain 
 us with his " success," boast of his family and 
 himself, bring out the differences in the situations 
 of himself and his friend and suggest the presence 
 of a malady which " compels the most active to 
 remain in their arm-chair and deprives them of 
 that exercise of the body which the brain needs." 
 My father has often made the remark that vanity 
 and excessive pride end in cruelty ; the moi- 
 trmaires, as he called them, lose all social and 
 moral sense and no longer sympathize with any one 
 but themselves ; whatever in the whole universe 
 stands in the light of their overwhelming person- 
 ality seems to them to merit the worst of disasters. 
 
 Meanwhile the Vain Man continued. He had 
 reached the point of tears, thinking of his own 
 particular health while looking upon his sick 
 friend. Then my father interrupted him. He 
 assured him that he had never felt better than at 
 that moment: " My gay spirits have come back;
 
 As Father and as Husband. 131 
 
 I am smoking my pipe again, which is a happy 
 symptom, and I am working splendidly. Very 
 soon I shall go out to Champrosay. There in the 
 green foliage and in the sunlight it is certain that 
 I shall finish my book before two months are up." 
 
 The other made a face. All of a sudden and 
 without transition and in the most natural way 
 in the world his malicious interlocutor related to 
 him the following fable : 
 
 "A rat full of self-sufficiency and therefore en- 
 vious in his nature went to make a visit to his 
 friend, another rat, who had just happened to have 
 poisoned himself. The wretched creature was 
 turning and twisting with pain in his magnificent 
 domain, but the visitor seated in front of him 
 suffered more frightful agonies yet, which were 
 caused by his despair at the sight of such 
 splendors. 
 
 " ' You seem to me rather yellow? * 
 
 " 'Why no, nothing is the matter. It is so com- 
 fortable here ! But how is it with you? ' 
 
 " ' Oh, as for me, I am very well indeed, I assure 
 you ! * 
 
 " And they both of them died seated there, one 
 opposite the other; but the envious one died 
 first." 
 
 During the recital of this fable I was very much 
 amused at the hesitating expression of the visitor, 
 who only understood about half the meaning. 
 When he was gone my father laughed heartily. 
 
 " The dear boy is longing for my death. His 
 usual exclamation is : ' What, you are at work ! '
 
 132 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 Do you not feel that in him the ' I ' amounts to 
 a regular hump? Oh, what a delightful study, 
 what a gay and thoroughly French one it would 
 be, to write about men like him and all the 
 envious ones ! One of those damned souls con- 
 fessed to me one day with a contraction of his 
 whole face: Yoii don't know how imich it hurts! 
 That man absolutely enjoyed the details of my 
 pain when I related them to him. I perceived 
 this and deprived him of the pleasure and from 
 that time on he took a hatred to me. He was at 
 the head of a very important administrative de- 
 partment and was a sort of autocrat. Knowing 
 his mania, his employees and those in places 
 below him never appeared before him unless 
 groaning and lamenting, pretending to pains they 
 did not feel, or with a bandage round their heads." 
 
 Numberless are the accounts in the little note- 
 books bearing on envy and vanity, but I do not 
 want to take the flowers away that grace those 
 marvellous pages which will soon appear in print: 
 " When I read my notes over again, I am aware 
 of the difficulty of drawing a character containing 
 that combination of follies whicii vanity provokes, 
 nourishes and increases. It is all gas, emptiness, 
 meat without nutriment ! " 
 
 He observed with attention the action of vanity 
 on children and women. The simplicity of this 
 vice in the latter delighted him: " They are just 
 like negresses with their glass beads ! " He has 
 even noted the vanity of sick people which causes 
 them to exaggerate their sufferings. A little sick
 
 As Father and as Husband. 133 
 
 man at Lamalou confessed to him his content at 
 the sympathy provoked by the fine appearance 
 of his carriage which made him " different from 
 the others." 
 
 " Wretched comedians that we are, and dupes 
 of our own comedies ! " He remarked how rare 
 are men who are simple and sure of themselves, 
 and especially those who, when in public places, 
 are not in the least troubled by the fact that they 
 know they are observed and watched. " How can 
 we, writing men, escape from self-consciousness 
 when our least gestures are spied out by a gossipy 
 press, and when people seem to ask our opinion 
 upon all sorts of subjects as far as possible distant 
 from those about which we do know something! " 
 
 Actors have been a precious mine of informa- 
 tion for him (remember Delobelle) in respect to 
 vanity: "In those enlarging mirrors that actors 
 are, one sees the movements of body, turn of eyes 
 and the attitudes common to all men - — but de- 
 formed and enlarged by the optics of the stage 
 and by the effect of the foot-lights." 
 
 I hasten to add, in order that I may not anger 
 the most susceptible of all corporations, that 
 Alphonse Daudet had the most affectionate sym- 
 pathy for a great many actors. He often made 
 the remark, how few among them were mean, dis- 
 honest or tricky and how actors help each other. 
 " These creatures have a factitious existence, real- 
 ity has almost no hold on them at all. When 
 could they find time to rediscover themselves and 
 to become like other people between the repeti-
 
 134 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 tions and representations of plays? An actor who 
 had returned to private Hfe confessed to me the 
 deep pain which that change caused him, like the 
 blindness of an owl in the noonday sun, and 
 the envy he felt for his comrades who remained 
 the other side of the foot-lights, that mysterious 
 and enchanted side, where human illusions are 
 turned to flesh and blood." 
 
 He had an actual affection for certain come- 
 dians. Amongst others I would note Coquelin, 
 Porel and La Fontaine. The latter astonished 
 him by his vast memory and his numberless sou- 
 venirs of the grand period, particularly his reminis- 
 cences of Fr6d6ric Lemaitre, who was the king of 
 that sort of man and type of his profession, a 
 person in whom the fine qualities and defects of 
 his class were pushed to extremes. 
 
 As to actresses, my father always showed him- 
 self amiable and respectful to them. But this 
 very respect was one way of avoiding that famili- 
 arity of the green-room, that vulgar use of thee 
 and thou which he hated, just as he did everything 
 which was not sincere. He always counselled me, 
 with respect to them, to avoid mixing dreams with 
 life and to fly from the disillusionment of the 
 reality. It was his opinion that those of them 
 whose business it is to change souls as they 
 change costumes, however frank and charming 
 they may be, offer very few guarantees to a faith- 
 ful heart. I was never able to make him admit 
 that that very suppleness itself was their charm. 
 He considered it was monstrous that the desire of
 
 As Father and as Husband. 135 
 
 a single person should be excited by sympathy 
 with the desires of all, and that one should admire 
 in a woman the admiration that other men felt for 
 her. That was one of our quarrels. I persist in 
 believing that, well informed as he was concerning 
 the theatrical world, he ought to have written a 
 sort of modern WilJielm Mcister for our enjoy- 
 ment, in which his familiar philosophy would have 
 been increased by various episodes in the eternal 
 novel of comedy. 
 
 So it was that if Alphonse Daudet loved justice, 
 no less did he hold exactness high, and that which 
 infringed on the natural pleased him not at all. 
 Ways of looking at things form as it were a chain. 
 Vanity and affectation are perpetual causes for 
 wickedness. What a skilful enemy of lies and 
 hypocrisy ! How little was he moved by false 
 tears ! How difficult it was to make him believe 
 in them ! A change of the voice, the slightest 
 trembling of a face, the least embarrassment 
 in a gesture, were enough to warn him. There- 
 upon he himself took on a change at once and 
 became harsh and severe. It was insupportable 
 to him to know that people were discounting 
 his kindliness. 
 
 He made a special point of what he called 
 '* reversed injustice," namely that which people 
 use with regard to rich and happy people ; it 
 seemed to him a sentimental monstrosity like 
 " Russian pity," which is limited to criminals and 
 low women. This kind of affectation, which is so 
 often found to-day, was odious to him ; it consists
 
 136 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 in showing sympathy for those unfortunates only 
 who have less than 3,000 francs a year and con- 
 sidering a catastrophe that befalls millionaires and 
 those in power well merited : " I myself," said he, 
 " have often to combat feelings of this kind in my 
 own breast. They are detestable feelings, just as 
 everything is which produces castes before the 
 face of destiny. Bad is everything which adds to 
 injustice, though it be an exaggeration of justice 
 and an ill-conceived need of social revenge." 
 
 He had a chance of noting very illustrious 
 examples of that " reversed justice" at the time of 
 the disaster when the Bazar de la Charite burned 
 down. Many " friends of the people " pretended 
 not to mourn over the " roasts " at " ten millions 
 apiece," as I heard them savagely called. My 
 father was very angry: " Cabotmage — electioneer- 
 ing views meant for the bars in corner grog-shops ! 
 Those who showed pity and courage in all the horror 
 of those cries and flames were the humble ones 
 and, at one and the same time, the brave ones of 
 this world. The people are worthier than their 
 representatives ! 
 
 Among our recent notorious hypocrites the 
 demagogue and false Jacobin were the object of 
 his disdain. He had seen the pothouse politician 
 close by — one trembling hand upon his heart, 
 the other firmly fixed in the pocket of his neigh- 
 bor ! He kept an indestructible recollection of 
 such men ; in his Soutien de Famille will be 
 found such a character in a masterly full-length 
 portrait, just the sort of man he knew how to paint.
 
 As Father and as Htisband. 137 
 
 What nausea political life gave to such an 
 enemy of poses and attitudes ! Perpetually 
 shocked by the spectacle of the parliament men, 
 his sense of justice was turned into anger. What 
 exasperated him more than anything else was the 
 placarding of big sentiments : " These fellows have 
 an idea that elevated sentiments are nothing more 
 than booby-catchers, and it is only necessary to 
 make motions to suit them. I often ask myself, 
 how it is possible that a man of real worth like 
 Clemenceau was able to pass several years in 
 such surroundings?" 
 
 Some years ago, at the time of the election of the 
 existing president, I went to the Congress at Ver- 
 sailles. On my return I gave an account of what 
 I had seen. That frightful witch's caldron, those 
 livid, grinning, hypocritical faces, those person- 
 ages all in black, wandering, spying, watching, 
 begging, prowling and baying through the gal- 
 leries filled with pale statues ! What airs of 
 importance, what arms uplifted, what whisperings 
 in each other's ears ! The greater part of them 
 seemed to be worm-eaten and twisted magistrates, 
 mumbling words like " constitutional, anti-consti- 
 tutional in the first place" — others, in the midst 
 of a group of grinning idiots, relating terrible 
 secrets to each other in a low voice. Throughout 
 all this rabble there appeared, clearly visible upon 
 those tricky and composite masks, the vanity that 
 befalls people in possession, the vanity at being 
 able to dispose of the future of poor France. 
 
 As I was finishing this picture my father, who
 
 138 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 had been listening to me with brilliant eyes, 
 exclaimed : " Oh, our poor France ! Whenever 
 I came near a man like that, I was always stunned 
 by the fact of his worthlessness, of his prodigious 
 foolishness. Except in the rarest cases, we see in 
 parliament the dregs of the country, the doctor 
 who has no patients, the lawyer without briefs, 
 the veterinary surgeon whom the animals are 
 afraid of — but the electors do not seem to be 
 afraid. According to the vulgar expression it is 
 just so much " cat-lap," and our mouths are full of 
 this cat-lap. 
 
 The dislocations of these wretched jumping-jacks 
 are reproduced by the press and carried round 
 about the world. Ah ! it would be a bad outlook, 
 if we had nothing else but our national repre- 
 sentation to represent us ! 
 
 There is a certain kind of man one often meets 
 who put my father quite beside himself. It is 
 he who " for lack of a label I shall call the leveller 
 of opinions and events." 
 
 While there are some who inflate everything 
 and see an army in five soldiers and a mutiny in a 
 little meeting, etc., there are others who voluntarily 
 diminish, annihilate and take from people and 
 things their importance and vigor. The Pro- 
 testant temperament, for instance, levels everything 
 to a sort of negative condition, to a vague neutral 
 idea and a perpetual condition of " not quite that." 
 This is one of the forms of Philistinism. In this 
 category may be placed the man who is so dis- 
 proportionately proud that everything which turns
 
 As Father and as Husband. 139 
 
 his attention away from his own deeds and actions 
 exasperates him and seems to him of no import- 
 ance : " Really my dear fellow, as far as that now? 
 Do you really think so? " or " Are you quite sure 
 of it?" or "Are you not letting yourself yield to 
 an excitement, which certainly is legitimate, 
 but ..." and so forth. 
 
 On hearing such arguments my father would 
 murmur: " Tartarin from the other side." But as 
 soon as the other, having reached some personal 
 adventure, forgot all his prudence and grew ex- 
 cited and feverish, he would dish him up his own 
 statements again : " Be calm, my dear fellow. . . , 
 Are you not exaggerating? Where are your 
 proofs?" And all this, with an eye glittering 
 with fun through the short puffs of smoke from his 
 little pipe. 
 
 I enter into these details in order to sketch as 
 well as I can a truthful portrait of a man who was 
 remarkable in the little as well as in the great 
 circumstances of life, one gifted with a superior 
 sense of the ludicrous. 
 
 He considered that the sense of the ridiculous 
 was indispensable to happiness: "Irony is the 
 salt of existence. It allows us to tolerate beauti- 
 ful sentiments, which without it might be too 
 beautiful. I love familiar virtue which works be- 
 hind the scenes without tunic or buskins and 
 without phrases ; I love a kindness of heart so 
 discreet that it does not even look upon itself. 
 For pride is so subtle that it satisfies itself with 
 monologues delivered before the looking-glass;
 
 140 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 they are just as destructive of simplicity as a 
 speech delivered from the platform. I love char- 
 ity which is so hidden that one can never distin- 
 guish the face of the donor, and so no gratitude 
 can be exacted, which alas, is the vestibule to 
 hatred. I like a shamefaced pity without pity's 
 mask, without the delight of the hand which is 
 stretched forth and without that secret thought 
 which so often exists, that you are happy not to be 
 in his shoes. 
 
 " The person who thinks about a wretched one 
 who lacks a home during the night or in the 
 storm, whilst he is warm and in shelter between his 
 blankets, that man is not far from that Sadism 
 which increases personal enjoyment by the spec- 
 tacle of the sorrows of others. I know well the 
 false look of virtue, the alibi-virtue, the gentleman 
 just getting gray who from two to five in the after- 
 noon distributes a great many tracts and some few 
 soup tickets to little working girls, and, along 
 about six o'clock, goes to see whether they really 
 are in good condition or not; and the society lady 
 who mends a pair of trousers for an old man for 
 effect, with her eyes fixed upon the clock, dream- 
 ing about some wealthy young man. 
 
 " Oh, charity's mark, charity's grimace ! Behold 
 a modish 'visit to the poor.' 'The Revolutionary 
 goat': —The dear, good lady, her dear, good 
 children and faithful Bridget — the voice from 
 the throat — the slice of corned beef — grand- 
 mamma who is coughing in her alcove — the new- 
 born child pressed to a cold bosom — ' Be of good
 
 As Father and as Htisband. 141 
 
 cheer, my friends ! Here is a pasty which is not 
 made of cardboard and here is some Bordeaux 
 wine. . . . Phick up your spirits. . . . You there 
 shall be a forester. . . . And you shall take a 
 part in a play of four acts ; you will solve the 
 
 whole social question Farewell, my friends, 
 
 emotion strangles me. . . . How delightful it is 
 here in your house. ... Come my children. . . . 
 Yes, I am your dear little mother. . . . • Who gave 
 you that nasty, filthy thing? That disgusting 
 little girl? Throw it away at once. It smells 
 badly ! ' 
 
 "Meantime, the benefactors having left the 
 house, the grandmother scuttles out of her alcove, 
 they drink the Bordeaux wine, dance about and 
 stuff themselves with the corned beef. Ha, ha, ha ! 
 what a lark ! What a mug she had, that old Brid- 
 get 1 Wretched little dwarfs ! shoot the pasty. . . ." 
 and so forth. 
 
 After this scene of comedy my father became 
 serious again: "Irony preserves us from such 
 follies as these. It teaches the benefactor that 
 he must not put his title on his visiting cards and the 
 virtuous man that he must hide himself away from 
 virtue even more than from vice, and the pitiful 
 soul that pity, if it is not discreet, is the greatest 
 raiser of violences in the world. Consider during 
 the Revolutionary epoch that glittering show of fine 
 sentiments, that fashion of sympathetic attitudes, 
 that zeal for sonorous charity, for alms in met- 
 aphors, for equality and fraternity in Latin ! Vic- 
 tims are careful of their words. But executioners
 
 142 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 are drunk with a tearful philosophy. Well, in 
 such mixtures as that one may seek in vain for 
 irony. It has disappeared along with ' mansue- 
 tude,' which is its comrade. 
 
 " Has it not a tendency to evolve itself from every 
 extreme opinion? Women do not like it, nor do 
 children, nor savages, nor the common folk, nor 
 heroes." He smiled with eyes wide upon the past, 
 stirring up old extinct flames; and in that smile 
 there v/as a multitude of continuations ; then he 
 continued : 
 
 "During the war of 1870, which was my great 
 period of schooling, I was able to take stock of 
 the anger which irony provoked in the common 
 people. In my company there was a question of 
 replacing the captain by way of election. They 
 begged me in my position as a decorated soldier 
 and former member of the army, to make a 
 speech ! Imagine, former member of the army at 
 thirty years of age ! I yield and ascend the plat- 
 form which is odious to me and simply paralyzes 
 me. I begin my speech, then stumble, get all 
 twisted up and end by calling out: ' Oh, get out! 
 I don't know anything about this captain, any 
 more than you do ! ' Then I climb down from 
 the platform in a glacial silence." 
 
 He stated that he was able because of his long 
 experience to bring aid and comfort to the most 
 touchy people, without leaving a single hateful 
 recollection in them. 
 
 " One summer afternoon on a marvellously calm, 
 warm and golden day, while seated at the cross-
 
 As Father and as Husband. 143 
 
 roads of the Greak Oak in the Senart woods with 
 your mother and the children, I saw at a Httle dis- 
 tance a wretched van full of gypsies — the children 
 all in rags, a single woman with harsh features and 
 a gloomy man who was peeling potatoes. I took 
 Lucicn by the arm and moved toward them. (I 
 had my alms all ready.) They saw us coming. 
 The woman grew very red. The man looked 
 gloomier than ever. I seized hold of a brat with 
 eyes like a torch and I glued my piece of money 
 into his little moist hand. 
 
 " He dashed away like a regular wild cat. 
 'Thanks,' murmured the woman. The man had 
 never budged. But I shall long remember this 
 walk of the benefactor to the obliged ones. The 
 obliged ones — what a frightful word, one which 
 justifies ingratitude ! " 
 
 This chapter would not have a fit ending if I did 
 not sum up now Alphonse Daudet's opinion in 
 regard to that great human problem, the search 
 after happiness. 
 
 1. There are as many forms of happiness as 
 there are kinds of individuals. In order to get at 
 them and teach them, therefore, it is necessary to 
 see and see clearly. 
 
 2. There is no -happiness without a strong no- 
 tion of right and justice. One of the moral levers 
 of the world consists in this axiom : — Everything 
 pays. 
 
 3. Seeming deviations from justice, even exces- 
 sive and prolonged ones, are merely a defect in 
 our own observation. In this case it is a matter
 
 144 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 of too narrow a combination of facts ; in that, it is 
 a question of some particular point which conceals 
 the rest. Or, again, observation dashes itself upon 
 some coarse obstacle and does not go to the 
 bottom of things. 
 
 4. There exists a science of justice which is not 
 the code Napoleon, but the dynamic of justice, 
 which is nothing else than a search for a perpetual 
 moral equilibrium. A man is not able to have 
 even a glimmer of this science before his fortieth 
 year. 
 
 5. The instinct for justice is equivalent to the 
 knowledge of justice. Very coarse natures may 
 contain in themselves a much more vivid and pure 
 gleam of justice than very wonderful thinkers. 
 That was seen by Christianity. 
 
 6. Pain and pity are the precious helpers of 
 justice, as long as they do not become excessive, 
 because justice always remains in the middle term. 
 When it is extreme, pain hardens and renders 
 people insensible to the outer world. When it is 
 extreme, pity becomes monstrous and loses sight 
 of its principal objective, which is to solace the 
 sorrows of man. And lastly justice, when it is 
 extreme, brings with it the most extraordinary 
 consequences in the direction of beauty and un- 
 happiness. 
 
 7. The search after happiness, and this is a 
 capital point, should always apply itself to others, 
 not to oneself A man should not try to escape 
 from any moral responsibility or any social sol- 
 idarity.
 
 As Father and as Husband. 145 
 
 8. In the family liappincss is traditional. The 
 love of parents regulates and transmits it. In this 
 sense the greatest and only irreparable misfortune 
 is "the loss of those we love." 
 
 9. One should never despair. 
 
 10. The man who has the gift and the taste 
 of observation or of imagination, has a greater 
 capacity in himself than others, whatever appear- 
 ance there may be to the contrary. The constant 
 exercising of the mind which gives suppleness to 
 ideas is one cause for happiness in cases where 
 work for work' s sake is only a means to escape 
 from life. 
 
 11. Egotism is a cause of unhappiness. Egotism 
 which attributes to itself the origin of all sentiments 
 without wishing to benefit by them in other re- 
 spects is a cause of unhappiness. 
 
 12. In the search after happiness a special place 
 ought to be accorded to pardon and to sacrifice. 
 
 It should be well understood that my father did 
 not give this rigid and didactic form to his in- 
 struction, but I think it is my duty to his method, 
 which resulted from experiences like those of 
 Socrates, Montaigne and Lamennais, to add some 
 apposite things which often cropped up in his 
 conversations. 
 
 The interest of these few axioms and others 
 which I will note lies in the fact that they formed 
 a rule of conduct. I have seen them applied with 
 a consistency which astonished me, and caused me 
 to reach the conclusion that the most generous 
 springs of action in our nature form an integral
 
 146 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 part of our tissues in the very depths of our 
 personality. 
 
 I cannot let the question of pardon and sacrifice 
 go without insisting on them. Life without pardon 
 seemed intolerable to my father : " Down here 
 error and vice grow in the very best fields. It is 
 not sufficient to tear them up. One ought to forget 
 their very former place." 
 
 One day he explained to me how the greater 
 number of moral faculties correspond with the 
 intellectual faculties. It is for this reason that 
 pardon is more difficult to those who have excel- 
 lent memories : " Sometimes it has been necessary 
 for me to make prodigious efforts in order to ex- 
 cuse some little treachery of a friend, or some out- 
 rage to gratitude. That is because my confounded 
 memory brings before me phenomena which are 
 past with a frightful air of life, as if under the 
 bright light of some great sentiment. I recollect 
 things as well as a jealous person or a criminal." 
 
 La Petite Paroisse is a very far developed 
 study in pardon. As was always the case, he had 
 taken his models from life : " Imaginary deductions 
 made by the author are quite large enough sacri- 
 fices to the unreal. At least let the source be 
 human." 
 
 As always he had grouped a multitude of par- 
 ticular examples round the central case — in the 
 book in question as it happens pardon is in combat 
 ^\'Cw jealousy. There was that gleam of sentiment 
 which Alphonse Daudet discovered in his memory. 
 How true also is this other sentiment from his lips:
 
 As Father and as Husband. 147 
 
 " It is impossible for a sincere author not to put 
 his whole self in his work ; which does not mean 
 that he relates an episode from his own life. But 
 he animates his own ways of thinking and feeling : 
 he dresses them and makes persons of them. 
 That which strikes us in the world and that which 
 we perceive and understand the best is that which 
 we divine to be similar to ourselves!* 
 
 And since he wished to illuminate everything 
 through examples drawn from reality, and since 
 he refused to follow me in my metaphysical 
 digressions, he added : 
 
 " Imagine that you are the victim of some piece 
 of ingratitude. At first your anger is vivid and 
 you think only of the special case in point. Having 
 become a little calm, you begin to philosophize. 
 You think of all those ungrateful persons who 
 exist in the world. There you are, vibrating 
 between that idea and its contradictions, ready to 
 weep from thankfulness, ready to scent out the 
 rancorous and forgetful, the debtors and bad friends 
 in the drawing-rooms and even in the street ! That 
 is the period of coincidence. Then it is that you re- 
 mark and discover everywhere circumstances very 
 like your own ; and the hallucination continues. 
 Well, with novelists these various associations 
 reach the height of a paroxysm. The knack is to 
 lend them life, make them step forth from their 
 abstract and purely moral regions and launch 
 them — into the worldly tumult, as the Jansenists 
 said. 
 
 " From this it results that we only understand
 
 148 Alpho7ise Daudet 
 
 that which environs us according as we experience 
 it. We live two parallel existences which complete 
 each other: one an existence of emotion, the 
 other of observation. To give prominence to one 
 or the other of these existences is to give oneself 
 up to unhappiness. Happiness lies in their 
 equilibrium." 
 
 The farther along in my reminiscences I get, the 
 more it seems hard to me to give to those who 
 read me an impression of the sincerity and serenity 
 which one of his conversations left behind it. Con- 
 sider that my father always chose the best moment 
 and the finest situation to explain his doctrines. 
 Thanks to him I have in my soul landscapes which 
 are connected with marvellous moral dissertations ; 
 with good reason he held that what is the most 
 profitable in sensibility and poetic creation is just 
 this harmony between the inner and the outer 
 world. 
 
 " Plato's commotions, those of Socrates and 
 nearer our time of Lamennais, show a lively desire 
 not to separate the two natures : human nature and 
 what is exterior to it. On the one hand the skies 
 and terrestrial views and their moving shades 
 become so many vigorous, profound and unforget- 
 table images; on the other hand, noble dreams of 
 imagination add their own mysterious harmony to 
 the trees and meadows, to clouds and rivers, and 
 become so many inscriptions, so many signs and 
 symbols." 
 
 And how this adroit philosopher seized upon 
 X\\e faiigtie point, the moment when this same en-
 
 As Father and as Husband. 149 
 
 thusiasm no longer exists, however vast and 
 interesting the subject might be! Then he sud- 
 denly interrupted himself and slipped into one of 
 his delightful pranks, or one of those joyous stories 
 which made the hours passed with him so short.
 
 150 Alphonse DaudeL 
 
 IV. 
 
 NORTH AND SOUTH. 
 
 The merit of having placed in a striking light 
 a type which up to his time had been merely a 
 caricature, " the man of the South," belongs to 
 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 Such an attempt required the hand of a South- 
 erner, who knows the strength and weakness of 
 his own race, but one also who is subtle enough 
 to place himself outside of himself, observe him- 
 self and seek in his own gestures and springs of 
 action whatever in them there may be indigenous 
 and national and different from others. 
 
 Among the many human problems to which my 
 father was attached and to which he devoted him- 
 self, it may be there is no other which he has so 
 passionately followed out through its different 
 phases and aspects. 
 
 " This question is not interesting to France 
 alone. Every country has its North and South, 
 two poles between which characters and tempera- 
 ments swing. It would be just as exaggerated to 
 ascribe all the moral variations in man to questions 
 of climate, as it would be silly to take no account 
 of pronounced differences which variations in 
 climate bring about."
 
 North and South. 151 
 
 It was while making researches on this point 
 that one of his master qualities appeared to 
 me in the most vivid light : " Total absence of 
 pedantry." 
 
 Our epoch, which pretends to be liberal, is one 
 of those in which perhaps the principle of author- 
 ity in intellectual matters is the most frequently 
 invoked. The revolutionaries merely aspire to 
 found schools, establish a dogma and organize 
 the faithful. The independents at once erect a 
 banner upon which one may read in giant letters 
 the word " independence," and then they start with 
 denying in their adversaries the least good sense 
 and rightful intention. A new kind of hypocrisy, 
 " scientific hypocrisy," has recently come to be 
 established. A multitude of unfinished and con- 
 fused ideas hiding behind obscure terms and Greek 
 and Latin compounds have become the weapons 
 in the hands of insupportable jackanapeses, who 
 brandish them on all occasions. 
 
 I have never heard my father employ a word 
 which did not belong to common speech. He 
 had an insurmountable and well grounded hor- 
 ror for newly invented words ; for most of them 
 are " monsters," disquieting examples of " civil- 
 ized barbarism," formed outside of every rule. 
 However wide a question was and however in- 
 volv^ed it might appear, he proposed first of all 
 to remain clear, and he applied the rule of Des- 
 cartes, which is to begin with the smaller diffi- 
 culties in order to reach the greater. 
 
 I have repeated many times that he based his
 
 152 Alphonse Dcuidet. 
 
 labors upon reality, which he tested in order to 
 be sure of support ; and that he recognized in 
 very few facts and phenomena that certainty and 
 limpidity, which allow them to act as bases and 
 points of departure. 
 
 The feeling of his race gave him a double touch 
 of certainty, an intellectual and a physical one. 
 A single case of the Southern accent delighted 
 him forthwith. In the railway coach, toward 
 morning, the apparition of olive trees and white 
 turnpikes through the smoky panes made him 
 " sing." That intoxication which the solution of 
 a mathematical problem gave to Descartes and 
 to Pascal, that same intoxication was felt by 
 Alphonse Daudet, the " imaginative observer," 
 when in contact with his art and with his " earth." 
 He loved all those in literature and art who, 
 remembering their origins, beautify and sanctify 
 the corner where they have lived, the places which 
 they have frequented. 
 
 Certain people who think that that which is 
 not sorrowful cannot be profound have re- 
 proached the Tartarin volumes for their exagger- 
 ation. But that exaggeration is in the blood. 
 Sometimes it takes on the cold form one finds in 
 Bompard in Ninna Roiimestan. That makes it 
 all the funnier. It appears that the tree of jollity 
 growing along the valley of the Rhone still pushes 
 two vigorous branches toward Touraine and Nor- 
 mandy, one branch of irony in Champagne and 
 another toward the He de France. 
 
 My father knew that " good humor " is neces-
 
 North aitd South. 153 
 
 sary to every stage and degree of mind. It is a 
 kind of illumination. To this virtue he owed the 
 fact of having escaped the current of pessimism 
 and kept his own character intact. Beside him 
 the young people seemed old men. At any mo- 
 ment of the day and notwithstanding his pain he 
 was always ready to laugh and make fun himself 
 over the vagabondage in which his imagination 
 indulged. 
 
 " Hurrah for Latin good sense ! " * How many 
 a time did not that exclamation burst forth to 
 close a discussion and sum up long theories. I 
 can still hear him saying to a friend at the end of 
 a philosophical dissertation from which he had 
 escaped: "Just look there, my dear fellow, look 
 at that rose-colored line of light away down there 
 along the crests of the trees ! is that not beautiful 
 and is that not perfect? We are at a distance, I 
 am short-sighted, and yet I can distinguish every 
 leaf; I could believe I was in my own country." 
 
 In his Qiiinze Ans dc Mariage which he left 
 unfinished there is the story of a couple very dif- 
 ferent in nature, a combat between the North and 
 the South. It is certainly a symbolical work, for 
 according to him the life of France itself, in a 
 large degree, has been determined by combat and 
 opposition between these two elements, so different 
 one from the other. 
 
 " There is neither the same way of feeling, nor 
 the same way of seeing, nor the same way of 
 expressing oneself. Sometimes the Southerners 
 are as completely closed up as are stones ; the
 
 154 Alphonse Daiidci. 
 
 exuberance of their imagination wearies them. 
 Then they fall into a torpor, not at all unlike that of 
 drunkards reviving from a bout, 
 
 " As to their imagination, it differs from those of 
 the Northma7is in these ways : it mixes up neither 
 the elements of things nor the kind of things and 
 even in its transports remains lucid. In the most 
 complex minds you will never notice that confused 
 interpenetration of aims, descriptions and figures, 
 which form the characteristic mark of a Carlyle 
 or a Browning or a Poe. Moreover the man of 
 the North will always reproach the man of the 
 South for the absence of shadows and mysterious 
 recesses. 
 
 " If we look at the most violent human passion, 
 love, we see that the Southerner makes of love the 
 main occupation of his life, but does not allow 
 himself to be thrown out of kilter by it. He likes 
 the gossip in it, the light frills and changing faces. 
 He detests the servitude it brings. For him it 
 becomes a pretext for serenades, delicate and 
 strained dissertations, for indulging in teasing and 
 caresses. It is with difficulty that he can compre^ 
 hend the connection between love and death which 
 exists at the bottom of every Northern soul 
 and throws a mist of melancholy over its brief 
 delights." 
 
 One point there is to which he was constantly 
 returning: the ease with which the man of the 
 South deceives himself by the mirages which he 
 conjures up himself, the half sincere confusion 
 into which he allows himself to drift with a smile
 
 North and South. 155 
 
 as a corrective. In his talents one may find the 
 impression of that kind of emotion which feels 
 bashful at its own self and fears to go beyond the 
 proper point. A part of the charm lies there; 
 there is a safeguard for a reader with delicacy of 
 mind in the guarantee that he will not have to 
 blush for his own tears. 
 
 He used also to boast of the natural eloquence 
 found among his compatriots. At the smallest 
 rural meeting one might be surprised by a stirring 
 speech given in a strong assured voice : " I did 
 not inherit this kind of gift. My tongue gets 
 twisted if it is necessary for me to express myself 
 before more than ten people. My short-sightedness 
 has something to do with it." 
 
 A subject for discussion that never ran dry was 
 the problem of lying: " Is it fair to treat a man 
 as a liar who becomes drunk with his own speech, 
 and without any low purpose, without the instinct 
 of deceiving or of getting the better of his neigh- 
 bor, or of profit, endeavors to embellish his own 
 life and that of others with stories which he knows 
 are untrue, but which he would like to have true, 
 or at any rate probable? Is Don Quixote a liar? 
 And all those poets who wish to take us away 
 from the actual and compass the globe in their 
 wide-winged flights, are they liars?" 
 
 Besides, he was wont to insinuate, among 
 Southerners people are not taken in. Every one 
 in his own mind rearranges the proportions 0/ 
 things as they are. As Roumestan says: " It is a 
 matter of focus."
 
 156 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 Alphonse Daudet's compatriots feel no rancor 
 with regard to his jokes ; they understood well 
 enough what an honor the writer did them, when 
 through the power of his pen he glorified and 
 published to the world their twists and turns of 
 manner : " I love my whole country, even down to 
 the food. Don't talk to me of heavy dishes, nor of 
 potatoes and weighty joints. An anchovy spread 
 on bread, some olives, figs and an aioli leaf — those 
 are the things I prefer. I envy the lot of shep- 
 herds, all alone in the midst of their herds, either 
 in the wide plains of the lower country, or on the 
 salted highlands of the Alps, between the marshes 
 and the stars." 
 
 For whomsoever has lived in a " mas " down 
 South in the same way as the " pacaces " or 
 herders of horses U ArUsienne is a work very extra- 
 ordinary in truthfulness. There one finds the prin- 
 cipal types, the shepherd, the " baile " and the 
 " bailesse." "Naturals" are not rare. It is very 
 curious to see how Alphonse Daudet has grouped 
 all these elements and from their union has extracted 
 a moving tragedy in which the vigor, acuteness and 
 harmony of antique poems have come to life 
 again. 
 
 The story of a young Provencal man who com- 
 mitted suicide because of love, and two women 
 calling to each other across a vast plain, one with 
 a high, shrill voice, the other with a deep one - — 
 that is the origin of the drama. My father often 
 spoke to me of it. He liked to work back in his 
 memory to the directing lines, and he applied to
 
 North and South. 157 
 
 this process great acuteness : " When I heard 
 those two voices of women at twilight alternating 
 through the blue space, I felt that they had im- 
 pressed me in a singular way, and the plot of 
 L ArUsicnne appeared to me as if in a sudden 
 hallucination. In the same way one evening, just 
 as the day ended, in front of the rose-colored and 
 gilded ruins of the Tuileries, I had a vision of 
 Rois en Exit and of that formula which closes 
 my book: 'A mighty thing lies dead.' 
 
 This problem of the beginning of a work and 
 of the earliest spark of suggestion occupied us very 
 often. My father thought that Edgar Poe in his 
 explanation of The Raven had forced the note 
 and used his imagination after the first imagining: 
 
 " I believe that in the case of all creators there 
 are accumulations of sentient force made without 
 their knowledge. Their nerves, in a state of high 
 excitation, register visions, colors, forms and odors 
 in those half realized reservoirs which are the 
 treasuries of poets. All of a sudden, through some 
 influence or emotion, through some accident of 
 thought, these impressions meet each other with 
 the suddenness of a chemical combination. It has 
 generally happened in that way with me. I have 
 passed months and months in arranging a drama 
 or book which emerged in one single second and 
 emerged with all its details complete before my 
 astonished mind. The more ardent the imagina- 
 tion, the more sudden and unexpected are these 
 pictures. The entire work of Balzac pulsates with 
 a fever of discovery and of impromptu."
 
 158 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 I called his attention to the fact that this is a 
 kind of " secondary " dream and that, in the case 
 of poets, reality and recollection, living persons 
 and phantoms are constantly crossing and chang- 
 ing each other, and preserve nothing in common 
 at last except the kind of lyrical power which en- 
 larges the features, the speech and the surround- 
 ings and arouses enthusiasm. 
 
 My father added : " This lyrical gift, this deep- 
 seated energy are perhaps nothing more than a 
 very profound feeling of race and origins. Goethe 
 is the complete German soul. It seems as if the 
 blood of Lord Byron carries in its flood the Anglo- 
 Saxon rage and the exasperated imaginings of an 
 entire people. Mistral is the exact mirror of the 
 South. . . ." 
 
 After a few moments of reflection he continued 
 modestly : 
 
 " Suppose we look to little persons for great 
 explanations. When I want to tune up my brain 
 and give it tone, I have recourse to what I have 
 seen in my youth. It is a habit niy mind has taken 
 upon itself to give a place where every sentiment 
 has its stand. Words like " love," " felicity," 
 " faith," " desire," do not remain inside of me in a 
 state of abstraction. They take figures to them- 
 selves and take part in events. Well, the light which 
 environs them is always the light of my own country. 
 It is beneath the sky of Provence that I establish 
 those traits of heroism, obligation and generosity. 
 In order that I may reach the point of the state of 
 trance and inspiration, I must have the sunlight
 
 North and So2ith. 159 
 
 such as exists down there, and even in the course 
 of extreme sufifering I keep recalling to myself 
 those turnpikes at white heat charged with a raw- 
 intensity which burns me and is my despair." 
 
 He sang the praise of heat: " Heat brings our 
 temperaments to flowering, to fruit and to burgeon- 
 ing. It gives to the human being his own particu- 
 lar perfume and to sentiments their vehemence. 
 When accumulated in an individual and in a race, 
 it acts like a subtler kind of alcohol, or like some 
 delicate opium; it transfigures and renders divine. 
 It does not take from the delicate shades of a 
 character but renders them finer and more fugitive, 
 just as it supports the great curtain of creepers in 
 the forests of the tropics and at the same time the 
 army of giants ; and the enormous serpent sleeps 
 in peace through excess of happiness, the while 
 his scales glitter and gleam. 
 
 " In the South laziness has invented the ' ca- 
 gnard,' that little corner built of the stalks of the 
 cane, in which people lie torpid like boa-con- 
 strictors and roast thetnselves in the sun." 
 
 Then his face darkened : " These sensations 
 have to be paid for later. We, the transplanted 
 ones, are seized upon by this homicidal North 
 with its mists and rheumatism, its mournful rains 
 and sleet. Wet outside, we are burning within 
 and are the prey of a twofold nature. Then our 
 impressions become more tender. The North is 
 difficult on the question of the choice of words, 
 their value and their place in the sentence, much 
 more so than the laz}^ voluptuous South. This
 
 i6o Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 was the cause of Baudelaire's suffering, who 
 learned to know the exuberant nature and power 
 of heat in the course of his travels, and when he 
 returned to his own country, searched the whole 
 vocabulary for those vanished charms, at the 
 expense of his own brain : 
 
 " ' Le monde s'endort dans une chaude lumi^re.' " * 
 
 So it was that the " transplanted ones " had the 
 benefit of his tender consideration : " Such is the 
 mystery of origin, that sometimes the traveller in a 
 distant land finds again his unknown stock and 
 blood and everything else that he has loved and 
 admired since his cradle, but which he knew only 
 in his dreams. What delicious intoxication to live 
 in the midst of a wonder which has turned true, 
 drink in perfumes and enjoy the savor of a land- 
 scape which had seemed forever reserved for the 
 kingdom of dreams ! Sometimes music exalts 
 me in this way. I penetrate to those states of 
 the soul from which a thousand closed gates have 
 separated me, gates through which I only heard 
 confused and vague murmurs before. And then 
 when one comes back from that region, it is sor- 
 rowful to find oneself again in the ordinary world, 
 where beauty is rare and transports are fleeting." 
 
 I took advantage of his happy frame of mind 
 to demonstrate to him that metaphysics also were 
 a kind of intoxication akin to music and are capa- 
 ble of furnishing very similar pleasure. 
 
 " But," said he, " if I understand you rightly, 
 
 1 " The whole world slumbers in the torrid light."
 
 North and South. i6i 
 
 these pleasures of reasoning may end in a state of 
 mind which we find elsewhere celebrated by Budd- 
 hism, a colorless state without joy or pain, through 
 which the swift splendors of thought pass like 
 falling stars. Well, the man of the South is an- 
 tagonistic to a paradise of that sort. The vein of 
 true feeling with us is frankly and forever open — 
 but open to impressions of life. The other side 
 which belongs to abstraction and logic, loses itself, 
 so far as we are concerned, in mists." 
 
 Then following his usual method he descended 
 from those extreme regions toward comic or 
 touching observations, which are able to make 
 one love reality. 
 
 " Violent and timid " — these words return many 
 times in his little note-books. My father had col- 
 lected a great number of examples of these " feel- 
 ings made supple," which as he explained, balance 
 themselves in some characters and often give a 
 contradictory air to actions : — 
 
 " Timidity slowly accumulates painful impres- 
 sions of all kinds ; for example, he has gone into 
 a shop and has not known how to ask for what he 
 wants, or else, embarrassed by his Southern accent, 
 he has permitted the shop people to foist upon 
 him half the articles on the shelves. Or he has 
 met a friend whose talk has wounded him and he 
 has not been able to say so. Or he has wished 
 to take a cab, but he has not dared to make the 
 necessary gestures or signals. 
 
 " Now he has returned to his own house and is 
 at rest with his wife and children. But at the least
 
 1 62 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 annoying observation the boiler bursts. He loses 
 his head and throws the plates about The sauce 
 slops over, the children yell, the servants are in 
 terror. That is the crisis. It stops almost as quickly 
 as it has begun, with a lot of tears and regrets arid 
 promises and transports of tenderness and love. 
 Sometimes the man goes to bed and begs for a 
 cup of beef tea to put himself in condition again. 
 
 " If," he continued, " the man and his wife come 
 from the South, this little drama has very slight 
 importance. But if the wife comes from the North 
 or vice versa, there appears a phenomenon of 
 weariness ; tenderness gives out ; the married cou- 
 ple separates ; or in other cases there appears a 
 phenomenon of contagion. Both of them become 
 violent and that is the better solution of the two." 
 
 In the most exact and gayest way he mimicked 
 the scenes of fury which quickly vanished and the 
 alternations of extreme tenderness and of wrath 
 which in the South constitute the small change 
 of conjugal life. 
 
 In Nunia Rownestan, Aunt Portal, like a good 
 many other characters, is a family portrait, whose 
 reality was of such a powerful sort that it was im- 
 possible for him to make the reminiscences of her 
 imperceptible : " Ah, what a power in the thing 
 which has been seen and observed! — yes, down 
 to the color of the hair, shape of the nose, the 
 favorite habit, or a grimace, which seemed to be 
 necessary and indeed indispensable to the sketch. 
 That marvellous artist, Nature, when she accentu- 
 ates a character, rounds out the physical traits
 
 North and South. 163 
 
 by moral characteristics in such a way that the 
 simplest modification of a portrait has an air of 
 deception. The individual and type carry along 
 with it their furniture, clothes, follies and, in fact, 
 their complete framework. And the writer who 
 is not haunted by the necessity of being exact, by 
 truth in detail and the actual relief, that man is 
 not a novelist." 
 
 I will add here a remark which frequently re- 
 turned to his lips : " There is an error often found 
 among prose writers which consists in believing 
 that the gift of style brings with it the power to 
 create types : But the means are absolutely differ- 
 ent. In general a talented man can tell a story 
 with himself in it, and if he is clever he will give 
 titles and springs of action to the different parts 
 of his composition. He will divide himself into 
 different parts, some of which are antagonistic, 
 and these parts will battle and discuss and act, 
 sometimes with eloquence ; but never do they 
 give us the illusion of life. 
 
 " I call such writers essayists and I greatly pre- 
 fer their studies of ethics or literature to their 
 creative attempts, which for the most part are 
 abortive, or turn aside from the path, or stop 
 half way." 
 
 " As to the writer of romances, that is quite 
 another matter. Imagination is necessary to him, 
 because without ceasing he must reconstruct an 
 animal from a single bone, forge a sentiment from 
 a look, a word, a gesture; he must divine from 
 an attitude some passion or vice and give to his
 
 164 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 account that harmony and amplitude which are 
 the generalization of some particular event and 
 trace the signs of fate behind the characters upon 
 the wall. 
 
 " Exactness is necessary to him because he must 
 not dislocate either his heroes or his heroines, in 
 whom he must preserve their logical and senti- 
 mental tones and must respect the conditions of 
 life and likelihood at peril of driving the reader 
 away, and finally because before everything else 
 he must place a guard over the structure of his 
 work, that inner architecture without which there 
 is nothing but disorder and chaos. 
 
 " Observation is necessary to him because it is 
 necessary that observation shall make of each 
 character a mirror, in which humanity shall recog- 
 nize itself, and because it will enrich the story, 
 the emotion and even the pathetic parts with 
 singular and direct circumstances. 
 
 " But another virtue is necessary which has 
 neither name nor label, more necessary than the 
 imagination or exactness or observation, namely, 
 that power of hypocrisy (let us use the word in 
 its Greek sense) which allows the author to slip 
 into the very skin of his characters, appropriate 
 their turn of mind, their habits, gestures, and to 
 talk according to their formulas, that same faculty 
 which made Shakespeare exist by turns as Anthony 
 and Cleopatra and as Desdemona and Polonius, 
 and allowed Balzac to be Lucien, or a few seconds 
 afterward, both Marsay and the unforgettable ^/r/ 
 with the golden eyes.
 
 North and South, 165 
 
 " The more I ponder upon it," said my father 
 with energy, " the more this gift seems to me 
 primordial, indispensable and irreplaceable. With- 
 out that we remain outside our creations, and these 
 retain something borrowed, something factitious, 
 which cannot deceive the simplest of readers. 
 Without that a man may be able to fix a single 
 time some unforgettable type, on condition that 
 this type is the nature of the author himself, or 
 his contrary, or a part of his nature enlarged ; but 
 the miracle will not renew itself and the sequel of 
 his work will consist of nothing more than a suc- 
 cession of outlines and sketches, more and more 
 dim, and less and less moving. 
 
 "The man who has the gift of transforming 
 himself may be lacking in style, may hurry and 
 write like a madman. There will still be in his 
 work a special power which will cause it to live 
 and last, whilst others which are more carefully 
 wrought and irreproachable shall have disappeared 
 long ago. 
 
 " Alongside of Balzac let us take the greatest 
 lyricist of the century as an example : Victor 
 Hugo — the greatest lyricist, that is to say the 
 biggest me, the most encroaching personality. 
 What do we see in his romances and his dramas? 
 Beings without measure or proportion, formed by 
 the Greasings and unfoldings of the me proper 
 to Victor Hugo, a me in a thousand manners, 
 but recognizable beneath its borrowed garments 
 through an identical speech, through his meta- 
 phors, his unexpected caesuras, his antitheses —
 
 1 66 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 in a word, through the whole romantic baggage. 
 They are wonderful poems, but they do not give 
 us the illusion of life; Javart is the sureness of 
 Victor Hugo ; Sister Simplice is his feeling for 
 beauty, or the generosity of Hugo ; Jean Valjean 
 is the whole of Hugo, his revolt, his magnificence 
 and his egotism, all in one. . . . This personality 
 of his remains so overflowing and incapable of 
 transformation, that in that marvellous book of 
 observation, Chose Vtie, it impresses its mark upon 
 all the events of the time, reserves for itself all the 
 wise words and correct conclusions, all the bold 
 solutions of questions, and appropriates to itself 
 history with a gravity and a sureness which 
 approach the comic." 
 
 I remember how one day, at the close of one of 
 our conversations, I asked him whence came that 
 power he had, that aptitude to slip into the heart 
 of another person and clothe himself with the 
 other's manner. He answered : 
 
 "You know I am not a metaphysician, but 
 across all the systems there appeared to me the 
 idea that philosophy, which is wise in the problems 
 of reason and intelligence, is only rudimentary for 
 that which relates to feeling. The latter has re- 
 mained mysterious, unexplored and full of abysses. 
 All the attempts of Descartes and Spinoza were 
 nothing more than bringing logical and cold solu- 
 tions to problems of passion and attempting to fit 
 feeling to reason. 
 
 " All I have is my own experience supported by 
 a few efiforts of the imagination. But the ex-
 
 North and South. 167 
 
 perience of a single person is that of all the world, 
 since we form individuals by narrow and special 
 combinations of general faculties. 
 
 " Well, human sensibility seems to me like a 
 sort of electrical circuit, each element of which 
 would be an abbreviated image of the whole. In- 
 dividual pity, individual pain, individual charity, 
 are merely the reflections of pain, pity and charity 
 in the universal sense. Moreover in this domain 
 everything is a matter of contagion and of quick 
 and wonderful transmission ; it happens not seldom 
 that a whole people is filled with an overwhelming 
 feeling for some idea of justice, and that to the 
 very death, but an idea which up to that time had 
 left them quite indifferent. 
 
 " We writers of romances ought to do everything 
 to render this communion of feeling more frequent. 
 Our ideal task is to excite generous movements, 
 keep souls in a state of metamorphosis in conni- 
 vance with other souls. 
 
 " Certain duties and rules derive from this. We 
 are culpable if we propagate evil or ugliness, 
 whether from thoughtlessness or lucre. We are 
 culpable if we do not console, but on the contrary 
 render people desperate and augment the sufferings 
 or vileness of the human race." 
 
 Then he came back to the question of race : 
 " If there ever was a people in whom this gift of 
 metamorphosis exists, this transmission of feelings, 
 it is certainly the people of the South. Among us 
 some one in a group may be telling of a frightful 
 accident. All the faces express disgust. They
 
 1 68 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 follow the words of the speaker with a liveliness 
 which is in marked contrast with the close-shut 
 mysterious attitude of a Northern crowd. Among 
 the latter, feelings which are better concealed go 
 on accumulating and under the least pretext may 
 suddenly explode. 
 
 " I myself," continued he, " can recollect whilst 
 still very small to have passed a part of the night 
 in recalling the sorrowful intonation my father 
 used when he heard of the death of his eldest son. 
 I adored that elder brother, but the correctness and 
 power of the accent and of the gesture which ac- 
 companied the anguished, harsh voice, took pos- 
 session of my sensitive organism, which as you 
 see was already prepared for the miracle of the 
 transformation. 
 
 . " For it is a real miracle, which surpasses spirit- 
 ualism and the turning tables. Balzac puts on the 
 scene a character in whom he supposes certain 
 vices exist, then he finds for every circumstance 
 certain typical phrases such as : ' Then I shall 
 take the little girl with me ! ' the exclamation of 
 Baron Hulot, which one feels could not have failed 
 to have been said. Those are not recollections. 
 That sort of thing happens in every country. It is 
 the supreme gift of the romance writer. 
 
 "Well, I have heard peasants among us, story- 
 tellers, who possess that gift to the very highest 
 degree and along with it a true genius for mimicry. 
 Nature had been prodigal to them just as it was 
 with my dear Baptiste Bonnet. Not only did 
 they have the emotion itself and the power to
 
 North and South. 169 
 
 4 
 excite, but they had style besides, a power half 
 
 traditional and half spontaneous over form, which 
 Blade has very accurately pointed out in his mag- 
 nificent collection Conies dc Gascogiie and which 
 causes little by little their laical and perfunctory 
 education to disappear. 
 
 " The sun, transformed into heat and movement, 
 furious and irresistible, glides into the veins of the 
 Southerners. Though it may intoxicate and turn 
 their heads, it never attacks their intelligence, 
 which on the contrary it renders stronger, deeper 
 and more lucid. Since the sun permits them to 
 meet each other on the public square or during 
 their labors in the fields at every season of the 
 year, it favors the 'humanitarian side, the social 
 connections which flow from love to municipal 
 activity, the results of which are strong and last- 
 ing races. The sun increases the power of the 
 gesture when it stands out against a bright back- 
 ground. It gives resonance to the voice. It 
 seems as if the harmony of the sun, the rhythmical 
 force of its rays, impregnate people with elo- 
 quence and the power of the word. And just as 
 it stops out colors and shades of color, just as it 
 reduces everything to the same plane, so it makes 
 illusions easy. 
 
 " It pulls the individual together- in the present 
 and simplifies for him a future which is golden and 
 warm like it, and filled like it with lively and joy- 
 ous sensations. It gushes forth feelings before 
 our astonished consciousness in jets and sheets and 
 cascades ; it deploys them magnificently, increases
 
 170 Alphonse Daudet, 
 
 » 
 their rapidity ten-fold and favors that gentle frenzy 
 of the mind in which bashfulness and heroism, 
 generosity and fear, boldness and timidity mix 
 together in a combination of truth which is often 
 ironical. 
 
 "This crowd of qualities is the crowd of the 
 human being itself." (Here my father would take 
 on a special expression and weigh his words as he 
 did when his conversation approached some chief 
 point.) " Of a certainty every human being feels 
 that crowd of sensations living and noisy within 
 his own breast, in his hours of excitement, stupe- 
 fied by the multitude of them rising in the 
 dark shadows of his consciousness ; it seems to 
 him that the forgotten hordes of his ancestors are 
 rising there. A universal shudder and whisper 
 run through him. Then some tendency defines 
 itself and becomes the leader of the crowd. Deci- 
 sion is the action of this leader. Hesitation is a 
 debate between those hereditary antagonisms. 
 
 " Well, among the Southerners the crowd of the 
 human being makes its appearance in a lightning 
 flash as swift and burning as a pain. The sudden 
 loosing of the cog of decision causes that disorder 
 of the face and gesture, that ardor in love, which 
 seem so funny if one does not belong to that exag- 
 gerating race." ' 
 
 My father brought together with great care — 
 they will be found in his notes — all kinds of pro- 
 verbs of the South, those in especial which relate 
 to the family and the position of woman in the 
 household. He searched among his recollections
 
 North and South. 171 
 
 for the faded outlines of peculiar relatives, such as 
 formerly grew up in the provinces when an over- 
 centralization had not reduced all characters and 
 brought them down to a single commonplace type. 
 
 Whenever he was in Provence he made every 
 peasant he met converse, listening with delight to 
 their picturesque and wild explanations mixed with 
 sententious remarks, such as revealed the Roman 
 churl: "At every turn of the road I discover 
 something of my youth. Is it necessary to accept 
 Dante's word? Is it really a pain, or is it not a 
 solace to recall hours of happiness when one feels 
 unhappiness and regret?" 
 
 As he has once written, he believed that " In 
 France everybody has a bit of Tarascon about 
 him." In another form he said that " A French- 
 man who gets excited becomes easily a Provencal." 
 So it was that during the war of 1870 he had been 
 able to note the propagation of false news, an ex- 
 cessive enthusiasm in connection with exaggera- 
 tions at the start, and a prostration during the 
 darkest hours in due proportion — those disorderly 
 ups and downs which form the bad side of the 
 " race of the sun." 
 
 He stated also that " the Frenchman has a 
 Keltic father and a Latin mother" and that "the 
 play of thftse two influences determine the somer- 
 saults in our history." 
 
 Whilst still young he had seen in his native town 
 the last open battles between Protestants and Cath- 
 olics : " I know a Huguenot at sight, particularly 
 the Southern species, from his accent, gestures,
 
 172 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 look and method of reasoning. He forms a being 
 apart, much more reserved, cool and master of 
 himself than the Catholic, There are two portals 
 for temperaments of this kind, just as there are 
 two gates to cemeteries in our country — schismatic 
 and orthodox portals." 
 
 As I have already shown, it cannot be doubted 
 that he himself belonged to the Catholic pole. 
 He had that pity, that complete pity which the 
 moment it finds its object cares nothing more for 
 dialectics. He had a taste for risk and adventure. 
 In talking this way I do not wish to say that Prot- 
 estants are lacking in courage either; on the con- 
 trary, I believe they have a very living moral 
 energy where it affects their convictions and their 
 immediate sense of justice. But they weigh their 
 actions and their words. My father was sponta- 
 neous. When it came to the domain of action 
 he put calculation aside; his natural generosity 
 placed him by instinct in the heroic path. Fin- 
 ally, as I have often remarked, there is among the 
 Protestants an extreme difficulty of making a de- 
 cision, a kind of paralysis of scrupulousness. My 
 father accepted responsibilities quietly, but imme- 
 diately, in a few moments, he took his position. 
 
 The creases which religion leaves in characters 
 were often the subject of our conversartions. He 
 understood wonderfully the features which faith 
 impresses on souls. The history of the Reforma- 
 tion had excited him, in so far as it involved the 
 opposition in the North to the expansion of the 
 Renaissance, which was entirely Southern:
 
 North and South. 173 
 
 " Oh yes, I understand how, beneath a low sky 
 and among the mists, those voluptuous Popes who, 
 according to that admirable joke of one of them, 
 could not imagine how men could live ' without the 
 carnal affections ' — those Popes bedizened with 
 ribbons and lace, surrounded by mistresses and 
 painters and music, must have revolted extremely 
 rigorous souls. That is it, there speaks the influ- 
 ence of climate. , . . To the present day the 
 look of a Protestant village in our rural parts 
 differs entirely from that of a Catholic village. 
 But there can be no doubt that Catholicism has 
 on its side the idea of pardon and sacrifice, and 
 the splendid dogma of substitution and ransom 
 which people have so often deformed and badly 
 interpreted." 
 
 The Gospels made the tears come into his eyes. 
 In the practice of religion he loved the pomp and 
 ceremony, he loved processions and the charming 
 whiteness of the girls going to communion, and 
 above all things the bell, whose solemn voice filled 
 him with melancholy. Never did an impious word 
 ever slip from his mouth. Was he entirely unbe- 
 lieving and skeptical? Those are secrets which 
 the conscience holds to the very last. He was 
 much pleased because my mother used to go and 
 pray at the graves of his relations. He showed a 
 desire to see us baptized and go to communion. 
 My civil marriage was very distasteful to him. He 
 was the son of a devout mother. In his extreme 
 youth he himself had shown an almost excessive 
 piety. Through his feeling for pain and owing
 
 174 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 to the rude trials of his Hfe, he remained close to 
 that religion which has offered the most sublime 
 ejaculations, the most profound restfulness to the 
 soul, and the most tragic and subtle renunciations. 
 I have heard him talk of Christ with an energy 
 and an unction which any preacher might have 
 envied, showing something narrow and familiar and 
 as it were fragrant and balmy, which suited well 
 the latitude of Palestine, but which he got from 
 his own Provence. Often his eye lit up at some 
 word of mystery or of miracle ; he expressed him- 
 self concerning faith and periods of dryness in 
 faith and the torments of believers with an elo- 
 quence which sprang from the intimate sources of 
 religious feeling. . . . And nevertheless he vener- 
 ated Montaigne even more than Pascal; neverthe- 
 less when one pushed him hard concerning these 
 problems, his replies showed acute skepticism or 
 there were long silences of doubt. 
 
 To sum up, I believe that that impress of the 
 race which was so strong in him had marked him 
 with the moral forms of the Catholic faith. I be- 
 lieve that he would have desired to hold the faith 
 and that absolute materialism and atheism were 
 odious to him, but his powerful and yet gentle 
 love of life for life's sake, of justice without recom- 
 pense and of pity which does not see its own 
 good, took in him the place of narrow concep- 
 tions of a future and better organized world. 
 
 In most cases and especially when there were 
 more than two present he avoided such conversa- 
 tions " to which each one brings nothing but vague
 
 North and South. 175 
 
 words which have been heard a hundred times 
 before." I remember that he was even astonished 
 that the grandest subjects known to humanity 
 should be precisely those on which the greatest 
 number of follies are accumulated, as if the spirit 
 became numb at a certain level and lost its clear 
 v-iew and fruitful ideas. 
 
 One summer afternoon as we were walking he 
 said to me : " When nature seems to us intention- 
 ally bad and homicidal, it presents us indeed with 
 a painful alternative, but what is much more sinis- 
 ter is nature's indifference when it appears to be 
 separated from us by an impassable gulf. 
 
 " So the way I explain it is, that believers close 
 their eyes to this world, stop their ears and shut 
 themselves up in the strange palaces of the soul. 
 Outside they would find nothing but perils, deserts 
 and temptation. As for me, in whose blood doubt 
 and the reminiscences of belief are at war, I have 
 a two-fold view of that which lies about me, 
 of this garden for instance, of the sky and the 
 waters. Now all this vibrates and it affects me, 
 it traverses aqd enthuses me ; again, I have re- 
 mained cold and unapproachable, and familiar 
 places have seemed to me unknown abodes which 
 are almost hostile. ... Is it not perhaps pain 
 which takes the color out of my little domain? " 
 
 My father, at one and the same time nomadic 
 in temperament, a lover of change and a follower 
 of tradition, respectful toward religion, scrupulous 
 and a mocker, detesting officialdom, cliques, the 
 lying honors of society and every kind of conven-
 
 176 Alphonse Datidet. 
 
 tion, seemed to mc a finished type, but a purified 
 one, of the man of the South. 
 
 Purified — because it is when he is in action that 
 the Southerner degenerates. My father did not 
 ignore this at all and judged very severely certain 
 celebrated politicians, his compatriots: 
 
 " A morality as loose as one's belt. Streams of 
 faults, talk as facile as their impulse and their 
 promises, yes, as their mendacity. When it comes 
 to those frightful politics, our good qualities change 
 very quickly for the worse : enthusiasm becomes 
 hypocrisy, loquacity and charlatanry; gentle skep- 
 ticism becomes scoundrelism ; love of things that 
 shine becomes rage for money and luxury at any 
 price ; sociability and the desire to please turn 
 to cowardice, feebleness and turn-coatism. Alas, 
 for the lofty comedies ! What breasts smitten by 
 the hand, what low, moved voices, hoarse but 
 captivating, what easy tears are theirs, what ad- 
 jurations and calls upon patriotism and the lofty 
 sentiments ! You remember the famous phrase 
 by Mirabeau : ' And we shall not leave except 
 through the power of bayonets ; ' well, a legend 
 which may be true adds this growling, oblique 
 continuation, given in a murmur aside with his 
 eye on the wink: ' And if they do come, we shall 
 skedaddle ! ' " 
 
 The love of solitude and reflection which had 
 gone on developing itself in Alphonse Daudet is 
 rarely a virtue of the Southern people : " Every- 
 thing outside " is a motto for that race of " brown 
 crickets," so changeable and noisy. That phrase
 
 North and South. I'j'j 
 
 of Roumestan's : " When I am not talking I can- 
 not think " is a profound truth. 
 
 I may remark in this connection how many 
 formulas, metaphors, phrases and definitions in- 
 vented and made popular by my father have made 
 quick fortunes and are currently employed by 
 many people who ignore their origin. That is 
 because those formulas and definitions have " the 
 living virtue " in them, that mysterious attraction 
 arising from picturesqueness and ease of applica- 
 tion, which continue them as they are, but some- 
 times deform their original sense. 
 
 However slightly affected by pride he may have 
 been because of his talents and success, still he was 
 delighted with these survivals. Somewhere he tells 
 how his heart swelled in his breast with pride when 
 he heard people say : " That man is a Delobelle, 
 or a d'Argenton, or a Roumestan, or a Tartarin." 
 
 Is it not one of the glories of men of letters to 
 make species in this way out of characters and 
 types of men who, before they wrote, were lost in 
 the indistinct crowd of human beings? " It seems," 
 said I to him, " that one of the purposes of art 
 consists in differentiating the vital elements, char- 
 acters, landscapes and even objects, and rendering 
 beauty in its smallest aspects visible and present." 
 
 He answered : " That reflection springs from 
 the letters which you wrote to me from Holland 
 with regard to the great realistic painters : Rem- 
 brandt, Frans Hals and van der Meer. I have 
 always thought in that way. A pencil of light 
 upon a face, a feeling which touches one, a ges- 
 
 12
 
 178 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 ture, a look, have each its own proper value, 
 immediate and immortal, which separates it from 
 all the luminous rays, feelings, gestures and looks 
 which are possible. We make everything into an 
 individual and we break up classes in nature." 
 
 The same kind of work which he undertook 
 with regard to the Southerners he desired that 
 each author should do for the men of his own 
 race. " That is the way in which one becomes 
 representative. Such special studies, far from 
 hurting general views, are useful to them and feed 
 them with examples." 
 
 In the little note-books a series of biographical 
 and historical remarks of the highest interest may 
 be read, from Mirabeau to Bonaparte and Thiers 
 and Guizot and Gambetta, all of which tend to 
 find the origins of their acts and words beneath 
 that heap of hypocritical conventions and lies 
 which the contact of other ambitions occasions in 
 men of politics, as well as their natural love of 
 combat and desire to exert their influence. 
 
 According to Alphonse Daudet the novel is a 
 prop to history. In some places it may even 
 enlighten and do it justice. Among the works 
 of contemporaries there is a good example in sup- 
 port of this theory in Gustave Geffroy's Blanqui. 
 Whilst studying a great character this conscien- 
 tious artist, this " poet of reality " which Geffroy 
 is, has explained modern processes of investiga- 
 tion and description. The result is a rare and 
 remarkable work which doubtless will serve as type 
 and model to many other essays in the same line.
 
 North 'and South. 1 79 
 
 Let no one imagine, however, that my father 
 pushed this taste for analysis from the point of 
 view of race to the Hmits of a fad. His " Latin 
 good sense," his love of proportion preserved 
 him from such an excess. He venerated Michelet; 
 he read and reread him ; he used new terms of 
 laudation for the sublime author of C Histoire de 
 France — de la Fenime — de la. Mer — de la Bible 
 — de r Humanity. He admired Taine, whilst at 
 the same time on his guard against that writer's 
 strained method of systematizing and whilst find- 
 ing him too hard on heroes and enthusiasts. 
 
 Lover of equilibrium and harmony in the do- 
 main of thought as he was, he understood and 
 excused fanaticism in the domain of action. And 
 I am ready to believe that he preferred Taine's 
 Litt^ratiire Anglaise to the Origiiies de la France 
 Contempora ine. 
 
 This love of history sometimes brought out 
 dialogues of the sort that follows : 
 
 /. — How is it that you have never yet written a 
 grand study on one of your heroes, or on some 
 period of the wars of religion in your country, or 
 some episode of the Renaissance or of the Refor- 
 mation, which I see you studying with such tre- 
 mendous energy? 
 
 He (with a sigh). — The man of letters does not 
 march in the direction he wishes. A subject 
 carries him along and turns him away from his 
 goal. In my notes you will find a Napoleon as a 
 man of the South, which our dear Frederic Masson 
 has made a reality and more than a realit}', also a
 
 i8o Alphonse 'Daudet. 
 
 Guerre des Albigeois d^ndi a Soiil^vement de VAlg^rie, 
 also a monograph on Raousset-Boulbon and 
 another on Rossel, etc. Subjects of that sort 
 exist without end along the borders of history and 
 romance writing. I wish to sound them and treat 
 them in accordance with the documents of life. 
 
 I. — Always concerning Southerners, episodes in 
 the combats between the North and the South? 
 . He. — Have I not repeated a hundred times that 
 all one man can add as contribution to truth is 
 infinitely little and weak? I think it well to accept 
 with caution a great many singular observations 
 on my race, its virtues and vices. A man cannot 
 note down everything. I believe in the future. 
 Reality possesses an incredible force which is dis- 
 tinct from the force of truth. 
 
 /. — Is n't that just the same thing? 
 
 He. — By no means. Truth is a moral judgment 
 made by men or facts upon reality. That judgment 
 may be obscure and weak and wreck itself. Truth 
 has a susceptibility far more delicate than any 
 printed paper of whatsoever kind. The atmos- 
 phere and the sunlight, and the breath and every- 
 thing causes it to degenerate. Reality however 
 exists and dwells forever. But a poet is neces- 
 sary to lend to reality the power to revive, the 
 power of propagation and duration. Michelet was 
 a " visionary of the real." 
 
 " Rarement un esprit ose etre ce qu'il est."* 
 
 That line, which I think is from Boileau, was apt 
 to be launched suddenly into a conversation by 
 
 1 " And seldom dare a soul be really what it is ! "
 
 North and South. i8i 
 
 way of an encouragement or reproach. Very 
 often he explained how character is the result of 
 a moral courage which causes a man to develop 
 himself after his own proper nature and bring 
 into relief the virtues and the vices which come to 
 him as a heritage. 
 
 " In the same way," he added, " there is an inner 
 timidity which prevents the individual from devel- 
 opment and stops the realization of his own type 
 and produces that quantity of worn and half- 
 defaced medals devoid of interest which constitute 
 the mass of men. 
 
 " A man of letters who is thinking of the 
 passions has necessarily to do with that mass and 
 those indistinct outlines. For it would prove a 
 wearisome convention if one were to put to work 
 characters alone. It is in dealing with these half- 
 tones and these passages in chiaroscuro that our 
 task becomes most difficult. ' iV hero of the non- 
 heroic,' there is the masterpiece which Flaubert 
 has realized in U Education SentUnentale. 
 
 " Well, a man of a different race or a different 
 epoch becomes typical for that very reason. 
 Roumestan or Tartarin would not stand out from 
 a crowd in the South. It is Paris that puts them 
 in relief. In the same way we still visit certain old 
 men or old ladies living apart from society, who 
 have preserved unchanged the prejudices and ways 
 of looking at things, the generosities and warm 
 sentiments of 1848. And so for us it is a delight 
 to find them, as it is a joy to the numismatist to 
 discover a finely preserved medal."
 
 1 82 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 In some romance by Jean Paul Richter there is 
 a character who has passed his childhood beneath 
 the earth, and the day when on stepping out upon 
 the surface he sees the sky and flowers and waters 
 and forests he thinks he has entered into paradise. 
 
 A similar, impression awaits any one who, having 
 lived in the North, suddenly discovers the South 
 and the joy of sunlight. Alphonse Daudet had 
 preserved piously that same joy. In his soul it 
 dominated suffering and melancholy. Whatever 
 his observation of the world brought to him which 
 was cruel, whatever his imagination suggested to 
 him that was harsh and vehement and terrible, 
 was softened and tempered by the golden warmth 
 of Provence, made serene again by those pure 
 horizons and harmonized in tune with those lines 
 which have been the directors of human wisdom 
 since the time of classical antiquity. 
 
 That marvellous sense for proportion is the safe- 
 guard of the mind. The man who descends into 
 his own soul and does not hold fast to a love of 
 harmony, plunges very soon into the blackest 
 shade. He becomes unintelligible. He loses all 
 power of instruction. This conducting clew is a 
 very little matter. It would have rendered such a 
 work as Ibsen's Peer Gynt, for instance, immortal. 
 Of a certainty a multiplicity of interpretations is a 
 sign of weakness. The poem becomes a sort 
 of game or labyrinth in which the cleverness of 
 the reader exercises itself. What brief mental 
 excitement it occasions is not worth one clear 
 recollection.
 
 North and South. 183 
 
 On that point my father was quite tranquil. 
 According to him, despite some rare exceptions, 
 French thought has remained in love with all that 
 is limpid and true and faithful to its origins. He 
 admired certain pieces by Ibsen, but not all. For 
 some there are, the symbolism of which seemed 
 to him infantile and false. For example he found 
 once more in Ibsen's northern sarcasm about the 
 wild duck the " India-rubber laugh, the laugh of 
 Voltaire congealed by Pomeranian sleet." He 
 had a warm admiration for Tolstof, the Tolstoi' one 
 finds in War and Peace, Anna Kareni)ia, in 
 the Souvenirs de Sebastopol and in the Cos- 
 sacks. The Kreiitzer Sonata was revolting to 
 him in certain places. But the neo-mysticism of 
 this author and his last evangelical works did not 
 interest him at all. 
 
 " TolstoT," said he, "has enjoyed in his youth 
 everything that there is in life which is exquisite, 
 luxurious and brilliant. He has loved the chase, 
 masquerades, races in sleighs, pretty women, 
 friends and the arts. But now he would like to 
 forbid that others should enjoy pleasures which 
 his old age prevents him from repeating. In a 
 conversion effected on a man of seventy I shall 
 always be on my guard against regrets and that 
 envy — oh, very distant, underhand and indirect, 
 but tenacious — which can be read between the 
 wrinkles." 
 
 The reading of Crime and Punishment had been 
 for him a crisis of his mind. That book had 
 prevented him from writing a work which he
 
 184 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 had projected on Lebiez and Barr6, and the action 
 of badly understood Darwinian theories on the 
 youthful poor. That deviation from scientific 
 formulas, the continuation of theories into practice 
 disquieted him, and we owe to that disquiet his 
 books: La Liitte pour la Vie, La Petite Paroisse 
 and Le Sontien de Famille. To return to Dos- 
 tojevski, he did not esteem the less Frhes Kara- 
 mazov and Maison des Morts ; but he preferred 
 the harmonious beauty of Anna Karenina and the 
 sumptuous sonorousness of Guerre et Paix to the 
 rousing fanaticism and actual hallucinations of 
 the Russian Dickens. 
 
 So the reader may see that his love for the 
 South did not cause him to disdain northern 
 literature. As to the climate itself, that is another 
 matter, and very often I would joke with him upon 
 the contradiction which existed between his hor- 
 ror for fogs and frosts and his taste for Arctic 
 expeditions.
 
 As a Man of Family. 185 
 
 V. 
 
 AS A MAN OF FAMILY. 
 
 Marcel Schwob, the author of Roi an Masque 
 d'Or and of Livre de Monelle and other strik- 
 ing works, insists with very great justice at the 
 beginning of his admirable work Vies Imagi- 
 naires, that when it comes to the biography of 
 great persons, family details are of the highest 
 importance. Very often a preference or custom 
 or some habit of the person will reveal more to 
 the reader than a long theory, or a whole body of 
 dogmas. Whatever is individual and specific in a 
 person can often be defined with greater exactness 
 by means of one of those remarks which the 
 academical spirit is always ready to look upon as 
 something that may be ignored. 
 
 That is one of the reasons why solemn eulogies 
 and discourses beside the grave almost always 
 reduce themselves to the same theme, colorless 
 and ecstatic, in which according to a ritual and a 
 formula, virtues without saliency and monotonous 
 circumstances are raised to the seventh heaven. 
 
 In his dress Alphonse Daudet showed an exem- 
 plary modesty. It was not always so with him. 
 At the first representation of Henriette Mare- 
 chal a young man with long, dark hair, whose
 
 1 86 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 frantic applause caused a shimmering silver waist- 
 coat to scintillate was noticed among the enthusi- 
 astic defenders of the play. The future Mme. 
 Alphonse Daudet, then Mdlle. Allard, was 
 present on that memorable first night: "Young 
 girls can be taken ; there will be such a row that 
 they can't hear anything," those were the very 
 words used by the friend who brought the tickets 
 of invitation. During the latter years when he 
 dined in town with his friends, or at his own house 
 on Thursdays, my father wore a jacket of black 
 velvet. He himself speaks in some part of his 
 works of objects that had been dear to the de- 
 ceased — " little figures, little efiigies," which cause 
 irresistible tears to flow. My brother and I used 
 to be glad to give him our arm and were proud of 
 his good looks, which on certain days were really 
 extraordinary. But with what reserve did he not 
 conceal his suffering ! It contracted his features 
 for a moment, but so quickly that we alone could 
 divine it: then he would reassure us with a smile 
 and at once relate some jocose, brave story which 
 was accompanied by a little quivering of the eye 
 that put us in touch with his heroism. 
 
 Very often, and we used to repeat it to each 
 other, what he did not say, what he gave us to 
 understand with his look, was just as penetrating 
 and prophetic as his speech. And what kindliness ! 
 *• In order to hold well what one has in hand, 
 always leave the cord a little loose. If children 
 have souls which are well-fashioned to start with, 
 such tenderness as one shows them will never do
 
 As a Man of Family. 187 
 
 them hurt. It will bolster them up later during 
 their hours of wretchedness. There is always that 
 much captured from our foe — life ! " 
 
 As a matter of fact, and I say this for those who 
 have not not known him, he was not at all the 
 hollow-cheeked and pallid Christ which some 
 people have represented him to be. When his 
 sufferings gave him respite he gave one the 
 impression of complete health. The table was 
 decked with flowers and shining glass. There 
 were the most diverse kinds of comrades : Dru- 
 mont, de Banville, Hdbrard, Gambetta, Leconte 
 de Lisle, Zola, Rochefort and how many others ! 
 At the very soup my father had already put every- 
 body at ease, delighting his guests with a brief 
 and brilliant story, one of those winged improvisa- 
 tions which were habitual with him, or else by 
 some observation irresistible in its fun. Then 
 with wonderful cleverness he would launch the 
 conversation in some direction favorable to the 
 lively spirit of one or other of those present, he 
 would direct, protect and breathe new life into it, 
 he would raise its quality and keep it human. 
 
 Now he would attack the whole company and 
 fly into an excitement, when the sound of his 
 voice, so warm and subtle, so ardent and engross- 
 ing, together with his brilliant eyes and gestures 
 made a most extraordinary picture and combina- 
 tion. Again he would yield the floor, make him- 
 self scarce and hide away, in order to allow some 
 champion in conversation to carry ofl" an easy 
 triumph. He knows the value of opinions, the
 
 1 88 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 rush of dispute and the intoxication that comes 
 from contradictions. On one point he is severe. 
 He holds to a decent tone in pleasantries and 
 woe to him who shall permit himself some risky 
 allusion, some word which might shock feminine 
 ears ! Then his looks grow black and his voice 
 changes ; dexterously and swiftly he recalls to the 
 mind of the clumsy fellow what the forms of 
 politeness are: " those pleasing frontiers, standing 
 on which one may say everything so long as no 
 disgraceful image appears, nothing that would soil 
 or degrade." 
 
 Gifted with an extreme sharpness of hearing, my 
 father heard what people were whispering ten 
 seats away from him ; he often took a hand in an 
 " apart " when he was not expected, and nothing 
 amused him more than to put to the rout some 
 slight mystery, a beginning of a flirtation or a timid 
 advance. 
 
 But it would not do to be the dupe of so much 
 kindliness and take this sweetness of his for weak- 
 ness and, as he says himself, " pull the chair from 
 under him." I have known two men who had the 
 finished gift of repartee. One was Alphonse 
 Daudet, the other was our dear and admired 
 friend Paul Hervieu. Such is the craft of the 
 fencer, who when unexpectedly attacked avoids 
 the blade of his antagonist and strikes for the 
 breast with a disconcerting swiftness. 
 
 There was the same sharp look, suddenly black 
 and implacable. There was the same choice of 
 unforgettable phrases, poisoned and barbed words,
 
 As a Man of Family. 189 
 
 which flew from his lips. A precious gift was his, 
 the abuse of which need not be feared in men of 
 that sort. A gift which has taken on enduring 
 form in works Hke L luiniortel or Peints par Eicx- 
 memeSy a gift that masters and keeps in sub- 
 jection the fools, hateful ones and cowards, and 
 one which, if it were wider spread, would improve 
 the health of society by renewing the air of rude 
 worldly assemblies which is often filled with it as 
 with a pest. 
 
 " Naturalness " that w^as the present which my 
 father made to every assembly in which he found 
 himself. He delivered people from the thousand 
 different bonds which hypocritical conventions 
 fasten on them, from the prejudices and folly of 
 snobs. Though a revolutionist and foe of abuses, 
 he preserved all the forms of politeness. And 
 while it appeared soft outside his satire was really 
 a terrible dissolvent. Very often grave, reserved 
 and cold men to whom all familiarity is repellent 
 seemed to change their character and gave them- 
 selves up to the author as if delighted to throw 
 aside their pose. 
 
 At dinner on a certain evening an elderly lady, 
 a much envied woman who occupied a brilliant 
 position, one whom he saw for the very first time 
 and who drank nothing but water, confided to him 
 the actual disaster in her life with a candor and 
 simplicity and naivete which fairly took his breath 
 away. Yet such confessions were by no means 
 rare. The attraction that certain people have, 
 which causes others to give themselves tip to them
 
 190 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 and consult them and take them for guides, de- 
 spite all distances and social fictions — that attrac- 
 tion is and ever will be mysterious. Oftener than 
 people think there is a desire to strip the soul nude, 
 cast off the robes of ceremony and pull one's wig 
 out of curl. 
 
 " There is," said he, " in life a critical moment, a 
 vif de la vie, into which two people, who did not 
 know each other the moment before, all of a sudden 
 cast themselves with a singular lack of prudence 
 and with that thirst for truth which torments 
 scrupulous people and believers." 
 
 As to good food, he preferred very simple and 
 well-done dishes ; for a hatred of artificiality may 
 reach to the most different kinds of feeling. 
 Coarse, dark or red dishes repulsed him. A 
 regular Provencal, he loved olives, well-done 
 dishes and salads — all the salads. We hap- 
 pened to be at a counter in I'Herault. 
 
 " Madam, is this piece of cold meat disen- 
 gaged?" 
 
 " Certainly sir. . . . Are you taking it with 
 you?" 
 
 " Of course I am taking it away." 
 
 " And the pickled peppers with it?" 
 
 "Of course! " 
 
 In our gastronomical reminiscences that slice of 
 cold veal will always hold a famous place. 
 
 He spiced his meals with various discussions of 
 Southern cookery, designed for restless and 
 burned-out stomachs. " In order to eat well 
 down South, you ought to eat with a Southerner.
 
 As a Man of Family. 191 
 
 You may as well believe me that Bonnet's saquette 
 contained marvellous titbits. It is the same with 
 eating as with everything else. It is no good 
 except with national surroundings. Then the 
 golden wine of our vineyards has its own merit. 
 And the game larded with little leaves of the vine 
 has its proper value, as it turns and bastes before 
 the crackling of the vine wood in the tavern. 
 
 " This dish is a landscape in itself ! " Such was 
 his greatest compliment. He preferred Burgundy 
 to Bordeaux. " One vulgar delight is drinking the 
 little wine of the people, whatever kind it may be, 
 the ginguet as it is called, so long as it bites the 
 tongue and is drunk along with a hunch of pretty 
 high cheese, a ' horror ' as ladies will exclaim 
 when one brings it home all terrible and smell)\" 
 
 When in Paris my father's day was divided be- 
 tween work, visits from friends and an occasional 
 walk. 
 
 As early as eight o'clock, placed at his own 
 writing-table, he began by dictating his copious 
 correspondence to his secretary, the same that he 
 had had for thirty years. As he has many a time 
 related, it was one morning in 1870 on the firing- 
 line that Alphonse Daudet made the acquaintance 
 of Jules Ebner, who was quietly reading an ode 
 from Horace in the face of snow and foe. Since 
 that time the two men have never left each other 
 until the death of one of them, the " master " 
 namely, for whom the other possessed an admira- 
 tion and devotion the like of which I have never 
 seen.
 
 192 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 For thirty years, without missing a single day, 
 notwithstanding often fatiguing work as secretary 
 in the editorial office of a great newspaper, Ebner 
 has sat there before my father with his pen in his 
 hand. He had to answer comrades and editors 
 and translators and beggars, and sift the good 
 from what was useless or piteous, or mere 
 knavery. . . . There 's a ring at the bell. ... It 
 is necessary to stop. . . . My father's welcome is 
 always pleasant ; his kindly air is in no sense a 
 mask, for according to the visitor, he passes from 
 the liveliest tenderness to mere ordinary cordiality. 
 
 Often a comrade passing through our quarter 
 of the town would come to "warm himself" in the 
 presence of the master, demanding advice or 
 counsel. He was so indulgent to young men ! 
 One of the last careers to open, in which he took 
 an interest, was that of Georges Hugo, whom he 
 loved and whose new and precocious talent he ad- 
 mired. The cry of revolt in the latter's Souvenirs 
 dUm Matelot went to his heart, just as every 
 vibrating and sincere word overcame him. For 
 my part I have sometimes written violent and even 
 bloodthirsty pages, but he never imposed the 
 slightest restriction upon me. Besides, he knew 
 that anger is only another face of pity. From my 
 earliest age he counselled me to use moderation 
 when in doubt and boldness when sure of my 
 ground. 
 
 I was hardly ten years of age when he caused 
 me to take my first lessons with the sword and 
 pistol " in order to give me the chance to be as
 
 As a Man of Family. 193 
 
 patient as possible, but when the right moment 
 comes to astonish an adversary." Until it began 
 to fatigue him too much, fencing was his chief 
 exercise. He gave himself up to it with enthusi- 
 asm, holding the floor for an hour at a time ; in 
 the game his whole nature came to the surface ; a 
 mixture of strength and delicacy, a prudent method 
 broken by sudden fits of audacity and violence, 
 made him a very difficult adversary. 
 
 He has written some excellent notes on the 
 game of sword and foil and on the revelation of a 
 character through feints as well as on irresistible 
 rushes, the truth of which will surprise professional 
 swordsmen. At the same time he used to take 
 long walks at a rapid gait through Paris, turning 
 over in his mind projects of books and characters 
 and associating the outer world with them at any 
 moment: 
 
 "The moment that an idea excites and makes 
 us quiver, at that moment through a singular 
 paradox we become most frightened and most im- 
 pressionable. The state of half consciousness is 
 the treasure-house of accessories, the store-house 
 of the romance-writer." 
 
 When his declining powers no longer allowed 
 him to take his long walks, as often as not he 
 made the house of his father-in-law Jules Allard, 
 " his best friend," the goal of his saunterings. At 
 the time my grandparents inhabited a handsome 
 house with a garden at the top of Cherche Midi 
 Street ; a description often recurs in the little 
 note-books There are reports of long conversa- 
 
 13
 
 194 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 tions held by my grandfather, who was a connois- 
 seur of men and a poet as well as a republican 
 belonging to the great epoch, with my grand- 
 mother L6onide Allard, a woman of broad and 
 mystic mind, who was wont to defend the rights of 
 the supernatural against the railleries of realism. 
 
 For my father was always rebellious against the 
 manifestations of the world beyond and held to 
 the opinion of his friend Montaigne concern- 
 ing the " unknowable." " My dear Mama ! " that 
 was the way he called her, " I have remarked that 
 superstition and skepticism form an equilibrium 
 in the same family, just as virtue and vice remain 
 equal, prodigality and avarice — and in general all 
 such oppositions in character." 
 
 Since the increase of his malady, he went out 
 very little in the evening. It had to be a very 
 exceptional occasion to decide him to break the 
 rule. Nevertheless he loved the world and society ; 
 the presence of strangers was good for him and 
 took him away from his suffering. The general 
 rehearsal of Sappho at the Op6ra Comique was 
 one of his very last pleasures. He took the very 
 liveliest interest in the staging of his pieces, in the 
 performance of the actors and in such a " prepara- 
 tion " as dramatic authors understand, a prepara- 
 tion which is one of the pleasures of the craft. He 
 generously distributed on the stage that mass of 
 observations " from the life " which he never 
 ceased to heap up, and he insisted that each detail 
 should be scrupulously regulated in consonance 
 with the actual.
 
 As a Man of Family. 195 
 
 It is hard to imagine greater interest than that 
 in a rehearsal of a play directed by Pore!, who 
 has the very genius of the stage and a limitless 
 invention, when aided by my father, who was life 
 itself What art, what care is necessary to reach 
 the point of illusion ! How difficult it is to cause 
 a character to move and to fix the entrances and 
 exits ! 
 
 At the beginning of winter the year before, 
 Massenet had come to the house to rehearse his 
 opera on the piano for the benefit of his chief in- 
 terpreter Emma Calve, the authors of the libretto 
 Henri Cain and Bernede, and his friend Daudet. 
 When the touching overture of the last act was 
 reached, that long lamentation broken by sobs, 
 my father was not able to withhold his tears. What 
 did he imagine, what did he perceive through the 
 waves of those sonorous agonies? He left us to 
 imagine, but we shall never hear that piece of 
 music again without trembling. 
 
 Portraits of Alphonse Daudet are numerous and 
 some of them are very close to life. But what 
 they are not able to render and what is forever 
 lost is that voice of his with inflections as delicate 
 and numerous as the sentiments it expressed. De- 
 void of the race accent but not of melody, it was 
 as if filled with sunshine when the soul was gay, 
 or again it trembled when the mood was melan- 
 choly. That voice has remained so completely in 
 my ears with all its shades of sound, that when I 
 open a book by him or when I quote some of his 
 sentences, I seem to hear him talk. Irony was
 
 196 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 revealed by a brief hesitation, a sort of stoppage 
 in the midst of phrases which the Hstener himself 
 sometimes had to finish. 
 
 His laugh was frank and splendid, full of an irre- 
 sistible contagion. Some slight discontent, such 
 as the small tiresome facts of paternity, used to 
 be expressed now by silence, without pouting but 
 very embarrassing, and again by side remarks, 
 made " without seeming to mean it." 
 
 " Hello, you seem to be going out a great deal 
 this week. ... It seems to me, that work is n't 
 getting on very well. ..." and other innocent 
 stratagems. 
 
 " If people attack my own, I turn into a savage 
 beast." In his case that sentiment was not exag- 
 gerated. By the exercise of generosity, kindness, 
 gentleness and humanity, he overcame his own 
 nature, but at bottom that nature was violent and 
 ardent in the extreme. A wound given to his 
 affections was provocative of anger which was all 
 the more dangerous because he knew how to con- 
 trol himself and await the hour for punishment, 
 which, according to him, could not fail to arrive : 
 " Just let destiny work itself out," he said to me 
 when I was hot to avenge an affront, " she will 
 shoulder the burden of your hatred." But in such 
 things as affected himself alone he was always in- 
 capable of rancor: "Bah, life is too short! " 
 
 Nevertheless I ought to remark that he very 
 rarely went back on his judgments and that 
 people were not apt to escape from his scorn. 
 Like those who love in good sooth, in friendship
 
 As a Man of Family. igy 
 
 he was very susceptible. Treachery struck him to 
 the heart. And when he thought that he himself 
 was in the wrong he would do everything in order 
 to repair his fault and would confess it without a 
 single drawback. 
 
 No man was ever less hypocritical ; none de- 
 tested so sincerely a lie : " That parasitical plant 
 which grows in people's looks, voice, gestures and 
 gait . . . which one has so much trouble in com- 
 pletely driving out." 
 
 So far as belongs to the comfortable things of 
 life, my father did not care for them at all ; he was 
 attached only to some few very simple things and 
 these always the same, his pipes, pen-stand, his 
 ink-pot, little souvenirs we gave him which were 
 strewed about his table. If we presented him with 
 cigars he distributed them to everybody who 
 came in during the day: " I have the greatest dif- 
 ficulty in the world," he used to say, '' to make 
 myself believe that anything whatever belongs to 
 me." 
 
 Here is the end of those "moral" souvenirs 
 which I wanted to bring together, lest along with 
 Alphonse Daudet the atmosphere of his charm and 
 tenderness should disappear entirely. And now, 
 having come to the end of my task, I perceive how 
 difficult it has been. Some will reproach me for 
 having been too chary of " stories." I did that on 
 purpose, believing that it is better to display the 
 heart and soul of a man like my father than to 
 fritter them away in episodes and anecdotes. What
 
 igS Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 more have I to add? In accordance with my soul 
 and memory I have sketched the portrait of a 
 human, simple yet complex, sensitive yet prophetic 
 in mind, in the strength of his age and his works. 
 If it has happened that I have grown weak b> 
 the way, his great shade will pardon me for it, for 
 that shade knows that I was sincere ; hereafter 
 it shall precede me on the short or long pathway 
 of my life, even as formerly he guided the steps 
 of his child. 
 
 LEON DAUDET. 
 
 This 28th of March 
 i8q8.
 
 APPENDIX.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 CONCERNING THE IMAGINATION. 
 
 A DIALOGUE BETWEEN MY FATHER AND ME. 
 
 To Mme. Alphonse Daudet : 
 
 Conversation is my greatest delight. To stroll through 
 the field of ideas, to play the vagabond with words and 
 points of view, to loaf about, regardifig human beings atid 
 things — that seems to me the highest of all pleasures 
 and the motnent in life when a person is the least distant 
 from the joys of imagination. 
 
 But one must have a good partner. Lovers of this 
 lofty game prefer that all good qualities and all defects 
 should show themselves in their full boldness and color- 
 for instance, that the violent man should be violent, 
 that the close reasoner should reason, the sensitive man 
 should nervously lay bare his sensitiveness, the phil- 
 osopher should coldly develop his theories. Every char- 
 acter is a good one which does not tty to dissemble, 
 because then fear of humbug makes the conversation 
 heavy and deprives it of that flowing, unexpected and 
 golden ease which makes it like the natural forces in 
 their quick and lively beauty. 
 
 I have known feverish and fanatical talkers whose 
 ingor was a thing to admire. A troop of remifiiscences
 
 202 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 and impromptus poured forth helter-skelter, as if through 
 a portal of life, across the magnificent fields of their 
 minds ; and these memories were fragile, unforgettable 
 7vinged things, and their impromptus rolled out with the 
 thunder of a torrent, enriched by every surrounding 
 object or whatsoever the heavens and aspect round about, 
 whatsoever waters and gestures, whatsoever the fields or 
 the streets might provide for the clever conversationalist 
 — what time the prophetic tripod of his eloquence shud- 
 ders hard and his opponent, contradicting him, shall start 
 the flame of his imagination ! 
 
 I have seen heajiy wains which were difficult to start, 
 but at last shook the very earth like the phenomena of 
 nature ; and I have known expert bowmen whose arrows 
 reached the empyrean, like swallows in good iveather. I 
 have known subtle intellects who talked by means of sym- 
 bols and of signs that expressed signs, just as the 
 Japanese work in jade or ivory, and lovers of clearness 
 who with their flamboyant metaphors pierced holes in the 
 darkest shadows. 
 
 I have known scientific men supported by the " actual 
 fact " and conscientious to the verge of craziness, and 
 also poets whom nothing can stop, who are wildly excited 
 by the absurd ; and all those voices, heavy or sombre, 
 shrill or light, feverish or calm, biting or whining, have 
 in my recollection such an intensity that at times they 
 return to vex my dreams. 
 
 I conversed best and most with my father. I shall 
 permit myself to state this one only from amongst the 
 crowd of truthful eulogies which my rdle as a son pre- 
 vents me from declaring — that he, my father, is inex- 
 haustible and always ready to engage, two wonderful 
 qualities which every good talker will appreciate. In
 
 Appendix. 203 
 
 addition to this, in order thai the flame shall always 
 be big and bright, he throrvs fresh wood all the time to 
 that hearth where ideas and words are smoking. And 
 to conclude, he listens to his partner and does not, like 
 certain egoistical bores, drag him over upon his oivn 
 ground. Any field is good /or him, and, because of an 
 inconceivably brilliant imagination, he makes it fertile at 
 once. 
 
 Now it is just exactly the imagination which is our 
 commonest subject — a rich and fertile matter without end 
 that never 7vearies one. Through man's will imagina- 
 tion embraces the whole world, and in magi's mind 
 imagination causes the whole world to find its place. 
 It is the grand treasury of poets, heroes and of all beau- 
 ties. Imagination alone renders life possible, which 
 without it is flat, monotonous and dark. It alone gives 
 value to love, even to death and annihilation. 
 
 So, then, let us suppose that my father and I are walk- 
 ing arm-in-arm about the garden at Chaniprosay on 
 one of those clear and golden mornings in summer when 
 a bird seems to hide behind every leaf. I am hardly 
 well awake after twelve hours of a dreamless sleep. 
 But my father's voice puts life into me and littk by little 
 thaws me out. 
 
 My Father somewhat ironical, as one can see in 
 that corner of his eye which I know so well) . - — Oh, oh, 
 so you have a theory concerning the imagination ! Be- 
 ware of that ; a theory is a hard load to carry, it is fear- 
 some ! Once you are in it you can never get out. One 
 finds it necessary to fold and crease facts and deform 
 them in order to make them fit that strange and uncom- 
 fortable trunk. 
 
 I. — But, my dear father, one has no clear ideas
 
 204 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 without theory. Otherwise facts he side by side like 
 children's toys and the mind does not progress. With- 
 out general ideas our most acute sensations and most 
 delicate sentiments remain in the domain of the animal 
 kingdom. 
 
 My Father {getting excited) . — But let me tell you 
 that oftenest these general ideas completely fool us and 
 that one good fact which has been carefully observed by 
 undimmed eyes is as vast and troublesome and as fruit- 
 ful as any hypothesis you may mention. Of course I do 
 not ask people to plant themselves on a note or a com- 
 mentary ; 1 do not ask a man to be a mere observer, 
 a fellow with a pair of spectacles or an eye-glass or any 
 other kind of diminishing-glass ; but just look at Darwin, 
 look at Claude Bernard — there are solid and true 
 friends of reality ; I admire their way of doing ; their 
 method is the one that delights me ! 
 
 I, — They also built hypotheses. 
 
 My Father. — Quite true ; but not in the way the meta- 
 physicians do. They have observed this, and then that, 
 and then the next thing. They tell you that ingenuously, 
 like the poets they are, with a strong bias toward the 
 picturesque. And they allow the obscure work of 
 generalization to go on in the mind of the reader. . . . 
 But I don't want to discourage you. So, then, you 're 
 going to unfold to me a theory concerning the imagina- 
 tion. . . . How did it come to you? 
 
 I, — While reading Shakespeare and Balzac. As soon 
 as we can get to the country, where, as you know, they 
 compose along with Sainte-Beuve the library, I seize 
 upon them with a lover's madness. There be the mis- 
 tresses who never deceive you ! I know them by heart, 
 the way you do, and still every time that I plunge into
 
 Appendix. 205 
 
 them again my brain is the richer for it and I feel 
 myself more energetic and alive. 
 
 My Father. — 'T is the wine of life. . . . Magnifi- 
 cently does it circulate in man. They made a deep im- 
 pression on me at an early age as they have upon you, 
 and to such a degree that I can recall having made 
 some character in Shakespeare, Polonius I think, the 
 hero of one of my first stories. The names of Balzac 
 and Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Balzac, are mingled 
 in my mind ; I hardly separate one from the other. It 
 has often happened that, confronted with a new person, 
 or a new sensation, I have had recourse to them in 
 order to label the saitl person or sensation with the 
 name of one of their characters or with one of their 
 stunning formulas. You have, of course, noticed the 
 subterranean analogies between those two geniuses? 
 
 I. — Most striking analogies ! They have treated the 
 very same subjects. Pere Goriot and King Lear, Pere 
 Grandet and Shylock. Les Chouans, that admirable 
 romance, has the same story as Romeo and Juliet, 
 namely, love between two people which has been held 
 in check by family or race hatreds. On this side are 
 the Montagues, who are the same as the men of the 
 White Cockades ; on that are the Capulets, who are the 
 Blues. Montauran is Romeo. Mademoiselle de Ver- 
 neuil is Juhet. And that odor of voluptuousness and 
 death which sheds its perfume around the lovers in 
 Verona renders the lovers of Fougeres fragrant during 
 their tragical wedding-night. 
 
 Mv Father. — Les Chouans is one of my favorite 
 books. It is amusing that you should have inherited 
 that taste. What I perhaps admire the most in Balzac is 
 his power of dialogue, the way he puts in the mouth of
 
 2o6 Alpho7tse Daudet. 
 
 each of his creations the exact word, what I call the 
 dominant word, that phrase which displays and opens 
 up a whole temperament. 
 
 I. — r And yet Balzac was always a failure on the 
 boards. 
 
 Mv Father. — It almost seems as if his imagination 
 was too powerful and representative for the footlights, 
 the painted cheeks, the monologues and all the rest of 
 the hypocritical cant of the stage. That monster carries 
 everything along with him, both scenery and characters. 
 And how well he knows how to place his footlights ; how 
 he understands the way of throwing light into a town or 
 a ward or a room ! And what an art he has for the 
 gradations ! To-night, after dinner, if nobody comes to 
 bother us, let us read in Les Chouans to the children 
 the assassination of Galope-Chopine by March-a-Terre 
 and Pille-Miche. You remember it, don't you? . . . 
 The mist-hung morning, the tragical approach of the 
 two Chouans, their silence and their hats? And that 
 drop of cider which falls rhythmically from the pitcher ! 
 There is a detail which would be ridiculous on the stage, 
 and yet which, in the book, is sublime. And then those 
 globules of milk which their knives crush against the 
 surface of their thick hunches of bread ! Ah, what a 
 man, what a man ! 
 
 I {insidiously and with an eye on my theory'). — 
 Yes, he contained all the rest within himself! 
 
 My Father. — That 's it — or at any rate he made 
 them live again " according to the swing of his imagina- 
 tion " as old Montaigne would have said. When you 
 have asked me in what talent consists, I have answered 
 you, talent is an intensity of life. That is not a mere 
 conventional explanation. I am firmly persuaded that
 
 Appendix. 207 
 
 Balzac and Shakespeare had within themselves a number 
 of violently excited lives, and that they had distributed 
 them through their works. 
 
 I. — There you are right into my theory ! I shall try 
 to be clear and not to jostle your Latin spirit, as you 
 call it. There is one sublime faculty which the philoso- 
 phers have neglected too much, and it is in my humble 
 opinion one of the keys to nature : the faculty of Imi- 
 tation or in the etymological sense Hypocrisy ; the de- 
 sire to slip into the skin of another person, pull on his 
 mask and submit oneself to the passions which torment 
 him. 
 
 My Father. — The desire of approaching other 
 human beings and assimilating their habits of mind and 
 opinions is just as violent as the contrary desire to 
 resist them. 
 
 I. — Well then, that faculty of hypocrisy is common 
 among human beings, but when pushed to the point of 
 paroxysm in men of genius it constitutes their greatest 
 beauty and their highest gift. By means of it Shake- 
 speare is Shylock and Balzac is Grandet or Gobsek ; by 
 means of it one is Rosalind, Desdemona, Miranda and 
 then again Caliban, Richard III., Macbeth, and the 
 other is in turn Madame de Maufrigneuse, Madame 
 d'Esparre, the Princesse de Cadigan, and then Hulot, 
 Philippe Brideau and de Marsay. It is perfectly certain 
 that Shakespeare and Balzac did much more than 
 observe the men about them and reconstruct life in 
 accordance with their observation. They metamorphosed 
 themselves into a multitude of characters and tempera- 
 ments, whose mere outlines they possessed within 
 them. Their works are the result of two series oj 
 metempsychoses. That is why they astonish us to such a
 
 2o8 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 degree. That is why their dialogues are lit with a glare 
 of truth so intense that the meanest characters show the 
 reflection from it on their faces. 
 
 My Father. — I just recall a speech by Balzac to a 
 mystic writer nowadays little known, but a very elo- 
 quent one — to Raymond Brucker, author of Chas de 
 V Aiguille : " My dear Balzac, where do you make your 
 observations of your heroines and heroes? " — " Ho, ray 
 friend, how do you suppose I can find time to observe? 
 I hardly have time enough to write." That proves that 
 the mechanism which you indicate was known to Balzac 
 himself. 
 
 I, — Balzac knew everything. An imagination like 
 his has perceived everything and co-ordinated every- 
 thing. He even had the gift of prophecy, since they 
 say that he molded his own period on the model of the 
 " Comedie Humaine." In order to be a sibyl it was 
 necessary only to reason rightly and to arrange the 
 events in their right series. But do you not find that 
 venturesome idea seductive — that a spirit should in- 
 clude within itself all the passionate or sentimental 
 characteristics — in a state of germs, of course ? Then 
 observation would merely play the role of the resur- 
 rector. That idea would give meaning to those moral 
 crystallizations which are called virtues and vices — those 
 deeply-founded structures of avarice, pride, luxury, 
 timidity, heroism, etc. 
 
 Mv Father {laughing) . — When the association of 
 ideas, as the pedants say, is rich, it is called imagination. 
 Such an hypothesis concerning the imagination would 
 not displease me at all. In the morning when I get to 
 my work-table and find in my portfolio all my characters 
 standing about, waiting for the life which I am to blow
 
 Appeiidix. 2og 
 
 Into them, I certainly seem to myself like that magician, 
 or, if you prefer the word, that "hypocrite," who is so 
 clever at slipping into temperaments and characters and 
 at rousing sentiments and sensations by the light of the 
 sparkles of memory. 
 
 I. — Are there not moments when your illusion is 
 absolutely complete, and when, like the actor whom his 
 rdle carries away and transfigures, you enter so deeply 
 into the flesh and blood of one of your children of 
 romance that you almost forget your own personality ? 
 
 My Father. — That happens seldom, but it does 
 happen. It is very possible that with certain privileged 
 writers the phenomenon may be habitual. I think it was 
 Balzac who answered some one who reproached him for 
 melancholy : " I am sad ... I am sad, because I have 
 just killed Vautrin ! " 
 
 I. — This essay on the metamorphoses of the author 
 into his different characters would be narrow if there 
 were no continuations. I am astonished that our period 
 has not produced a grand philosophy of sensibility, 
 creating its own object according to Hegel's formula. 
 All the philosophies which we have had up to the present 
 day, all without exception, have been philosophies of 
 the intelligence, grand systems very cleverly arranged by 
 induction and deduction to tell how our brain acts when 
 it studies itself. Pascal, that clever and nervous mind, 
 that martyr with a singing soul, Pascal has conceived of 
 the universe within us as a series in slight disaccord 
 with the series of the universe without us, and has recon- 
 ciled the two by means of Grace. By a prodigious 
 effort Spinoza has united sensibility with intelligence, 
 and by studying the woof of our impressions he made 
 the discovery that it was identical with that of our judg- 
 
 14
 
 2IO Alphonse DaudeL 
 
 ments. There cannot be two tapestries in the loom ol 
 destiny. We might have doubted it, had it not been for 
 that great man, but we ought to be thankful to him for 
 having painted an original picture of the human senti- 
 ments in so far as they are subject to reason. 
 
 All those monuments are admirable : Le Discours 
 sur la Methode and the Pensees by Pascal, and the 
 Ethics and the Monadology and the Foundation of 
 the Metaphysic of Habits, will rightfully remain the 
 object of respect for future generations ; but in a certain 
 way they are the dwellings of the past. As little as we 
 possess a truly modern architecture do we possess a 
 modern philosophy which satisfies our existing culture. 
 
 My Father. — Now you explain why philosophy has 
 so little interest for me. It is all very well to apply and 
 force myself, I yawn over the Pure Reason and the 
 formulas of Spinoza have always given me the impres- 
 sion of a set of prepared skeletons. 
 
 I. — Because you are a complete "sensitive," con- 
 scious and sincere. What you would like to find in a 
 philosophical work is an attempt at explanation of 
 those mysterious flashes of sensibility, those fugitive 
 appearances which cause us to see a contrary emotion 
 even in an emotion itself. Carlyle, Emerson, Novalis, 
 MaeterHnck — there are marvellous dreamers for you ; 
 and very often the will-o'-the-wisps of the swamps leap 
 and dance on their dreams, so intense and charged with 
 intellectual fever are they. But although they have 
 approached contemporary sensibility they have by no 
 means taken possession of it yet. A book difficult to 
 write would be an essay on the sentient states of con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 It is certain that it will be written. It will spring
 
 Appendix. 2 1 1 
 
 from a general desire for it, as all great and necessary 
 works which are the offsprings of the times and of ener- 
 vation do spring. Just as round our over-refined states 
 of sensation (new words are surely necessary for new 
 ideas) there rises a sort of vapor which excites and 
 makes us lucid in mind, so in the same way certain 
 signs announce a great epoch-making work about those 
 periods which are fertile in intellectual work. 
 
 My Father. — Here is one of my liveliest sensations. 
 One day during a terrible heat I was crossing the Place 
 de la Concorde which was shining and vibrating like a 
 copper saucepan. A watering-cart passed by. A little 
 butterfly was playing and dancing about the thin rain of 
 drops which the cart was emitting and turning into vapor 
 along a narrow luminous spray. That butterfly played 
 and danced with a fever and an agility in following the 
 jet of water and a sense of pleasure which seemed to 
 enter into my spirit to an unaccustomed depth, and 
 troubled me like the sensitive gradation- marker for 
 every kind of intoxication and vivid enjoyment, it 
 troubled me with the subtlety and ephemeral wisdom of 
 such joys. Under that implacable hot sky, in a flash 
 which was almost painful through its intensity, I had a 
 glimpse of a multitude of impressions, some of them 
 melancholy, some of them joyous, the exact sequence 
 of which I should have great difficulty in recollecting, 
 but they trouble me still, and too hot a sun recalls to 
 my memory the tumbril and the butterfly. 
 
 I. — The philosopher of whom I speak and whom 
 I would like to see would take account of observations 
 like those ; your anecdote is an admirable step in my 
 argument. For every theory having to do with sensibility, 
 every study applied to those miraculous regions whence
 
 21 2 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 our power, our joys and pains derive, all philosophy at 
 such heights, presuppose a thorough study of the imagi- 
 nation. For if reason and judgment govern ordinary 
 acts and all movements which tend to struggle for life 
 and preserve that life notwithstanding obstacles, the 
 imagination and the faculty of receiving images regulate 
 sensibility. Sensibihty and imagination are two con- 
 necting terms. That is what is not sufficiently understood. 
 When I see a very joyous or very melancholy child who 
 knows how to amuse himself alone and do without his 
 little comrades, thus affording the proof of a lively and a 
 personal sensibility, I say to myself: there is a future 
 " imaginative." It is a rule that never fails. The phil- 
 osopher whom we are clamoring for should write it at 
 the head of his essay. 
 
 Mv Father. — Is it not sensibility which allows those 
 metamorphoses to take place of which we were speaking 
 just now? You know my love for vagabonds, for all 
 those poor devils just the same color as the turnpike, 
 who stop at the well to take a drink, and whose slightest 
 movements I used to watch when we dwelt in that 
 house by the side of the high-road? Well, you must 
 not laugh, but I assure you that sometimes I have left 
 my room and house and my own skin and have en- 
 tered underhand into those organisms, penetrating those 
 wretched longings and terrible thirsts, those frightful 
 feelings of contentment in bread, wine and shade. 
 There lies a chapter on sensibility ! Was it pity, that 
 great moral spring which led me on, or was it a central 
 and basic curiosity which sharpened my sight and wits? 
 I do not know. All that I know is that I have lived 
 the life of those wanderers and nomads, of those uncon- 
 scious poets. What delightful things might be written
 
 Appendix, 2 1 3 
 
 about them ! Did you ever ponder — it is that butterfly 
 which rouses me still — did you ever ponder on their 
 long and deep melancholies, on all the beauties of nature 
 which penetrate them without their knowing it, those 
 grain-fields, that rustling and moving yellow sea of wheat- 
 heads, the rose-colored swales and solitary woods where 
 the rabbits hold their congregations, the fringes of the 
 forest, so fresh and beautiful and impressive? One day 
 whilst you were still a child I was taking you the other 
 side of the S^nart forest and we saw two white pigeons 
 that were winging their way side by side beneath a 
 thunderstorm, skirting the opaque and copper-edged 
 clouds. Well, all that poetry of nature circulates 
 through the vagabond along with his blood and his 
 wretchedness, and so, in that philosophy which you talk 
 of, it ought to form a chapter apart, because there lies 
 an assemblage of true and primordial sensations. 
 
 i^A/ter a momenfs reflection). — Now, you see, abstract 
 ideas do not constitute healthy nourishment. Very soon 
 they degenerate into a juggling trick and the mind that 
 gives itself up to them loses in relief and color. The 
 man who desires to talk about the imagination splits 
 up his subject into chapters and for each chapter he 
 devises a series of cold arguments. Why does he not 
 proceed by examples? Contemporary novels, the his- 
 torical romance, such as we make it to-day, have taught 
 me one thing : Everything hangs together in the moral 
 world. All the while that certain given personages are 
 in combination to form a given situation, beneath or 
 above them a comedy or little drama plays itself along 
 which is the " fresco " or caricature of that very situa- 
 tion and defines it ; very often a miser has in his dining- 
 room a common print representing the grasshopper's
 
 214 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 visit to the ant. Hamlet, preoccupied by a crime it 
 is necessary to perform, receives the actors at Elsinore 
 instigated by a marvellously just intuition, and orders 
 them to play a scene which will give everybody a fore- 
 taste of murder and that terror which is felt when the 
 torches are carried out. We are Hamlets for ever 
 and ever. We never accomplish an act which is not 
 accompanied by additional phenomena in which that 
 act is reflected and made ready ; alongside of the 
 masterpiece nature accumulates conscientiously the 
 preliminary sketches. 
 
 All this I say in order to explain to you why the phi- 
 losopher, while he shall be tracing the similar laws of 
 imagination and sensibility, ought to describe on a 
 parallel line various examples and episodes to illustrate 
 his text, just as we do for little children. I do not 
 know a finer book than the work on English literature 
 by Taine. Every moment the writer turns to the pic- 
 ture and shows us an example of his theory. His formu- 
 las are enriched by admirable verses from Shakespeare, 
 Byron or Keats, or by some incisive tirade from Swift 
 or Fielding. Literature is so abstract an art, so separated 
 from actual things, that one cannot bind it to the earth 
 by too solid and powerful chains. And I would make 
 the same statement concerning philosophy, if indeed it 
 cares to really touch us and make an impression upon 
 our period. 
 
 /. — A convenient method is to describe human beings 
 as types in order to make them carry that faculty of 
 mind which one is studying. According to me, Balzac's 
 works ought to be considered a phenomenon of the 
 highest cerebrality, as a series of examples for just such 
 a philosophy of feeling. Alive within himself the incom-
 
 Appendix, 2 1 5 
 
 parable author of the Come die Humaine had a power 
 which permitted him to place outside himself those hu- 
 man characteristics with which his soul was filled. That 
 power is Desire, " the essence of man " as Spinoza said, 
 that desire which we all feel but which we understand 
 so badly and of which need is nothing but a reduced 
 image. 
 
 ' Tis a singular result of modern civilization that desire 
 increases while realization diminishes. The more society 
 sets men in frames and fixes them into immovable ruts 
 which are generally degrading and embruting, the more 
 does it place them in contact with a number of luxu- 
 ries and pleasures they cannot help longing for which 
 become so many nightmares for them. Most of our 
 fellow-men of the present day are in the condition of 
 peasants after a visit to a Universal Exposition, whom 
 the commonplace of their condition disgusts, who dream 
 of dancing girls and houris, and kill their old parents 
 in order to enjoy a single night of riot. This rise of de- 
 sire has for corollary the rise in the number of suicides. 
 
 " Je sortirai, quant k moi, satisfait 
 D'un monde ou raction n'est pas la soeur du reve.'* ^ 
 
 Now in the case of Balzac, as with Shakespeare and 
 Racine and Dante, action is the sister of imagination. 
 For desire kills the man who lacks imagination, or sets 
 him crazy ; but it forces the imaginative man to find 
 means to escape from a world which resembles him and 
 has the imprint of his own exasperation and frenzy ; but 
 he is the grand creator of ideas and characters. 
 
 My Father. — And then, through a strange concatena- 
 
 1" For me — with satisfaction would I spurn 
 A world where actic i is not fancy's twin."
 
 2i6 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 lion, beauty is the mainspring of desire, or if you prefer, 
 the illusion of beauty. As a matter of fact there is 
 where poetry delivers or rescues us. A spectacle too 
 beautiful, an impression too vivid, incline our souls at 
 once to melancholy. And if we are not able to cast our 
 emotion into song, then that melancholy turns into sad- 
 ness, and behold ! through the force of desire beauty 
 becomes the spring and cause of pain. Beauty, Desire, 
 Pain, are three stimulants of sensibility which the im- 
 agination softens, extinguishes and takes with it into its 
 own depths. 
 
 There are hours in life when the reasons for the exist- 
 ence of things seem to be on the very point of appear- 
 ing to us, when, leaning over to watch ourselves, we 
 perceive the deep wheels going and the glittering sheen 
 of our machine. 
 
 Yon remember seven or eight years ago a certain 
 visit we made to Mistral in Provence? We passed a 
 charming day filled with light and poetry, and Mistral, 
 that great creator of dreams, had fairly intoxicated us, 
 as much with his talk as with a marvellous wine. Toward 
 the close of twilight we took our way towards Tarascon. 
 It was the time of the wine harvest. Slow carts brushed 
 past our quicker carriage, they were filled by laborers 
 with faces proud in their lines and girls showing a pagan 
 grace. How pale all those faces were above the long 
 pale highway, underneath a sky, rosy to exasperation, 
 where warm mists were floating ! The vine-dressers had 
 hung bunches of grapes upon the wayside crossings, 
 their ofterings from remote antiquity. In that light air 
 happiness, power and delight in work harmonized with 
 each other to such an extent that the spectacle became 
 a glorious one and our eyes became wet with tears, as
 
 Appendix. 2 1 7 
 
 happens when all of a sudden Beauty raises her veil from 
 her face. ... (a silence, then after reflection') .... 
 Yes, that is it, that is it exactly : Beauty, Desire, Pain. 
 
 I. — Such phases of excited feeling must have been 
 the normal state of a Shakespeare or a Balzac. They 
 only saw the outer world through the medium of the 
 world which they carried in their own breasts, or the 
 opera-glass of their imagination. And in fact all their 
 characters, no matter how close they approach reality, 
 share the mark of the Master, that is to say, something 
 gaunt and excessive which from time to time seems to 
 shock our good sense and ceases to move us. King 
 Lear and Pere Goriot degenerate into monsters of pater- 
 nal love by the mere exercise of that love. 
 
 Do you not feel that those exaggerations are yet one 
 proof more for the origin of those colossal works within. 
 The greater number of human beings do not possess 
 complete sentiments, or feelings that are pure, as when 
 they leave the forge in heroic minds. They do not 
 drink without much adulteration the wines of Love, 
 Hatred, Pity, Anger and so forth. . . . They are will- 
 ing to content themselves with vague mixtures, and so 
 the hatred of this man is partly supported by fear, and 
 the pity of that man is limited by his own egotism, and 
 the remorse of yonder third is quenched by his rage. 
 
 In a word, passions for the majority of human beings 
 become lessened in consequence of contact and mixture. 
 They lose their sharpness, their edge and color. They 
 become weak and without interest, because they cease 
 to have anything in them which works toward splendid 
 deeds. 
 
 Now it is among the " imaginatives," among those 
 who are not afraid of surpassing reality, that we would
 
 2i8 Alphonsc Daudet. 
 
 find the model and typical passions if they quitted the 
 ordinary world. They subject them to the movements 
 of their own soul, its fever and ups and downs. They 
 lend them that beauty which consists in marching 
 straight toward an end and to the extreme limit of real- 
 ity, notwithstanding events or obstacles. Every one of 
 their characters accomplishes his destiny impetuously 
 and with an imperious air and drives life before him as 
 if it were some great cloud of dust. There is a miser, 
 Grandet. He will be miserly to the very verge of the 
 mania of avarice. His hands and feet, his whole body 
 will take the form of his own vice, his looks will take on 
 the sheen of metal, each one of his words will be 
 timorous, gloomy, but at the same time bearing the im- 
 press of a hard, implacable egotism. Here is a knave, 
 Philippe Brideau. No one has gone so far and with 
 such ferocity in the direction of knavery. One may take 
 them all and stamp upon the brows of all some vice or 
 some virtue. And that vice or virtue will be without mix- 
 ture of attenuation such as existed in the first rnan. 
 
 Such works as those move us to such a degree because 
 they spring from Truth enlarged. 
 
 My Father. — Are we not close upon the old debate 
 between the Real and the Imaginary? Although you do 
 not belong to that period, you have heard of the howls 
 which greeted Flaubert and his continuators, Zola, the 
 Goncourts and me. People could not pardon us for 
 introducing the ordinary facts of life into novels. Yet it 
 is true that since then realism has lost ground and turned 
 aside into vulgarity, and it is true that people have tried 
 to find a doctrine where there was nothing but an eman- 
 cipation. We demanded the right to talk about every- 
 thing, treat every subject, select our characters and
 
 Appendix, 2 1 9 
 
 pictures from any class we chose. It cannot be denied 
 that L Assomvioir is a masterpiece, nor that Germanie 
 Lacerteux is another. Good or bad, our opinions have 
 given a lively jump to the national literature and cer- 
 tainly no one has a right to complain of that. 
 
 But the old reproach is different : " You wish to paint 
 reality? Then you will be mere photographers, passive 
 mirrors, phonographs, mere machines which reproduce 
 what falls into their mouths or their pipes and moreover 
 reproduce everything without choice or discrimination. 
 You wish to paint reality ; but we already know too 
 much about reality. Reality is here about us every 
 day ; it besieges and throttles us. What we ask of art is 
 precisely to take us away from the real and show us 
 other faces, other skies, other lands than those about 
 us which weary us by the monotony of their constant 
 presence." 
 
 That is a specious reproach. It troubles one because 
 it does include a certain modicum of truth. Absolutely 
 unjust when it applies to writers like Flaubert, Zola, 
 Goncourt, it does have grounds when it comes to 
 wretched copyists and scribblers who apply without any 
 talent formulas they have badly understood. 
 
 And the knot of the problem — that is why I am at- 
 tacking it just now — the knot of the problem lies 
 entirely in the imagination. 
 
 I. — I must confess to you that the adventures of 
 magnificent characters, such as heroes, will always interest 
 me more than those of little ordinary citizens ; and I call 
 magnificent characters not only kings and captains, but 
 likewise philosophers, authors and artists. The bursts 
 of rage which that which has been so coarsely entitled 
 " naturalism " has provoked have nearly caused us to
 
 2 20 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 turn to literature of exceptional characters. From this 
 point of view Symbolism was an inevitable reaction. 
 
 My Father. — ■ It is not a question here of symbolism 
 or naturalism. You know how little importance I have 
 always given to schools and classifications. I hate them 
 ail. I belong to none of them. 
 
 We have to do here with reality and truth. Now 
 there is nothing outside of the real. There is nothing 
 outside of the true. And those two terms meet again in 
 a certain virtue : Sincerity. Note that my formula is 
 broad. A sincere lyrical writer is in the way of truth 
 when he gives himself up to lyricism, and though he may 
 change the lines of reality in accordance with the laws 
 and build of his brain, remains true so far as his con- 
 science is concerned. He does not seek knowingly the 
 false. A sincere mystic is in the way of truth when he 
 constructs his castles of clouds and mists according to 
 his own consciousness and in accord with those changes 
 in Une or shape which that same consciousness of his 
 produces in the real. 
 
 In other terms, reality is subject to the metamorphoses 
 of the imagination, but without it, lacking such nourish- 
 ment, the imagination would be grinding upon empti- 
 ness, it would break down and fall to ruins, turning into 
 craziness or imbecility. And whatever may be the form 
 and degree of the imagination, the owner of that imagi- 
 nation is sincere in regard to it, so long as he shows 
 his products just as they come from his factory. 
 
 There are no forms of art, there are merely tempera- 
 ments. Well, these temperaments are so numerous and 
 varied that they never exhaust the real. An original 
 spirit when it comes into this world may have the plan 
 of reconstnicting the world. As long as this world lasts
 
 Appendix, 2 2 1 
 
 he will never use up all the innumerable resources which 
 life, and the harms which life is subject to, present 
 forever to the imagination. 
 
 Innumerable resources ! I have hved a good deal ; 
 when still quite young I had the faculty of observing ; 
 and, so far as the imagination goes, I have known during 
 my childhood all the terrors felt by corsairs, explorers 
 and the abandoned ones. Well, every day I get a sur- 
 prise and have some new observation to make ; and 
 particularly I realize that I have made mistakes. To 
 recognize one's mistake and to confess it is the beginning 
 of that science which has not yet received a name, and 
 nevertheless 't is one that seems to me the highest and 
 most important of all sciences, since it consists of ex- 
 tracting from life all the instruction which that life con- 
 tains, since it includes morals, psychology and physiology, 
 since moreover it does not destroy pity and does not 
 excite pride, since it has neither professorial chair, nor 
 pedants, nor institutes, and since it carries its recompense 
 in itself. 
 
 I. — Is not that science in which imagination finds its 
 resources precisely the school of sensibility ? 
 
 Mv Father. — It is that and something beside. You 
 are right in saying that it enriches the imagination. 
 The great " imaginatives," the great observers of the 
 human heart, have carried that science with them as 
 though it were some new organ in their breast and have 
 used it as easily as they breathed or digested. It exists 
 in every page of Montaigne, showing itself in that good- 
 humored and fragmentary form which alone suits it, 
 because it is a science which must fear axioms, deduc- 
 tions, formulas and other fribbles. It ought to wear its 
 belt very loose. Pascal, who has enriched it with many
 
 222 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 admirable discoveries, nevertheless had an imagination 
 too mathematical for it, and since it is the science of 
 life, what is necessary to it, beyond everything else, is a 
 lively imagination. 
 
 I. — Do you believe that this science is destined to 
 have a great future ? 
 
 My Father. — Greater than any other. Since 
 Auguste Comte and the Philosophie Positive the scient- 
 ists in all the exact sciences have been imagining 
 that their progress was continuous and without limit. 
 And they regard artists with disdain, because, as they 
 say, they do not progress. Now in the first place, do 
 we not progress, are we stationary? Down the long 
 history of letters and arts, is it not possible to observe 
 certain modifications of this Sensibility and this Imagina- 
 tion, concerning which we were talking just now? There 
 is an entirely new problem and one which will not be 
 wanting in interest ! 
 
 But apart from all that, it does not seem to me it is 
 at all demonstrated that the progress of science is con- 
 tinuous and without limit. In science as in art every 
 original mind tends to quit the paths trodden hard by 
 his predecessors in order to make a path for himself. It 
 results from this that very rarely does a field of study in 
 which some man of genius has accomplished tremendous 
 progress continue to attract the attention of superior 
 minds ; the domain of science seems to me thus filled 
 with regions of great importance which have not been 
 thoroughly explored. 
 
 I. — If one were to study the movements and march 
 of the scientific imagination in this century, one would 
 find a strikhig confirmation of what you say in the list of 
 discoveries. Since the time of Bichat, who has taken up
 
 Appendix. 223 
 
 again the microscopic study of tissues and of their rela- 
 tions? a study which was entirely different from those 
 histological labors which are so much the fashion nowa- 
 days. Since the time of Claude Bernard, who has taken 
 up again the thorough study of the vaso-motor nerves 
 and the source of animal heat? The school of La Salpe- 
 triere has popularized the works of Duchenne of Bou- 
 logne, but it has completely abandoned the study of the 
 relations between the muscular groups and manifestations 
 of feeling, that is to say, the portion of the work of that 
 great and misunderstood man which contains the most 
 genius. What can be said of medical science in France 
 during the last twenty years ? The spirit of competition 
 and of clique has destroyed all initiative among us. But 
 the field has remained clear for men of intrigue and 
 fools ; a good many more stages are necessary before a 
 reaction can be produced. Moreover it appears that 
 the manellous labors of Pasteur, which, in the beginning 
 were so bold and broad, are about to be wrecked in offi- 
 cialdom, and scarcely will be likely to have continuers. 
 You are not wrong in believing that the lines of demarka- 
 tion are more apparent than real and that in the one, as 
 in the other, progress is occasioned by independent 
 minds which are innovators and breakers of formulas. 
 
 Mv Father. — All very true ; but the science of life 
 of which we were speaking might march on with giant 
 strides, thanks to the multiplicity of its points of view. 
 
 The work might be divided up. As to that which 
 belongs to the imagination, those who are earnest in 
 considering abstract ideas might look upon the science 
 under that aspect. In that way they might inaugurate 
 that Philosophy of Sensibility' from which you expect 
 marvellous things, and which in any case would lift us
 
 224 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 out of the problems of the Pure Reason to some 
 extent. 
 
 Those who like myself are zealous servants of the 
 " concrete " would occupy themselves less with imagina- 
 tion in itself than with the human beings who show it. 
 Some of us would take the scientific man. Others would 
 study poets. But examples, many examples ! It is 
 through examples that one gets lasting results. Con- 
 sider Plutarch and Saint-Simon. Those who are fond 
 of monsters will study the changes wrought in that sub- 
 lime faculty which constitutes criminals and madmen. 
 
 I. — When it comes to intellectual enterprises, have 
 you any confidence in co-operative labors? I would 
 expect that more should result from the efforts of a 
 single mind ; a book for instance which would be for 
 Imagination what Taine's book was for Intelligence — a 
 clear and a correct summary. 
 
 My Father. — I think the task would be very heavy 
 for one person. If you wish we will search out some of 
 the principal objects of such a work and trace a sort of 
 general summary in big lines. 
 
 I. — Very well ; nothing could be better for clearing 
 up one's own ideas than to see how one should go to 
 work to explain them to another person. 
 
 Let us begin by defining Imagination, and, as one 
 describes a continent, mark off its boundaries, its rela- 
 tions as to neighborhood to or dependence upon other 
 faculties. 
 
 My Father. — I am no lover of definitions at the 
 start. Besides, the framework of gender and species is 
 very narrow for that voluminous faculty ; it would burst. 
 
 I think it might be well at the start to lay down this 
 chief principle : that Imagination and Sensibility are two
 
 Appendix. 225 
 
 connected faculties, or else that Sensibility is the reser- 
 voir used by Imagination. Just now we sufficiently laid 
 stress upon that point. But it is basic and it will at once 
 assure originality to our work. 
 
 I. — That having been done and with examples in 
 support (Balzac and Shakespeare will do admirably for 
 our demonstration) we can establish the necessity of 
 considering Imagination from two points of view . . . 
 
 My Father. — The concrete and the abstract: ist — 
 Study of Imagination among individuals ; 2d — Study of 
 Imagination in itself. 
 
 After this rapid preamble we will enter at once into 
 the heart of the subject by giving a few portraits of 
 famous representatives of Imagination. Faithful to our 
 method of using examples, we will take a poet, a scien- 
 tist, a philosopher, an artist and a man of action. Our 
 chief care shall be to demonstrate that this faculty 
 changes with the innumerable forms of life, just so soon 
 as it is a question of a living faculty. We are seeking 
 laws and truths, but we shall insist on the differences and 
 the exceptio7is. That method will reduce error to a 
 minimum and stifle all pedantry. 
 
 It shows us what we really are, poor observers in a blind 
 way and by no means arrogant men of theory hide- 
 bound within their formulas even when their formulas 
 are false. 
 
 For the poet we could not have a better example than 
 Hugo J and for sub-title thereto " or sensitiveness to the 
 word ; " as a sub-title for Lamartine preferably " or sensi- 
 tiveness to the rhythmic period," and that for Baudelaire 
 " or sensitiveness to nicety." Poor Baudelaire ! It was 
 that long research for the exact word which killed 
 him.
 
 2 26 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 As to Victor Hugo, if we compare his verbal sensitive- 
 ness to sensitiveness to cold and heat for example, we 
 perceive that his most admirable poems are veritable 
 "shudders" — and prophetic shudders besides. In the 
 wear and tear of life, through rubbing and degeneration, 
 most words have become vulgarized, and so we employ 
 words without force and lacking blood; they are mere 
 anaemics. Thanks to his verbal sensitiveness Hugo has 
 given all their energy, all their reflected gleams back to 
 words. This kind of miracle takes place with him par- 
 ticularly through the placing of the word in the phrase. 
 Just as jewellers present certain jewels at the most lumi- 
 nous point and after such a fashion that they shine with 
 an unexpected and burning brilliance, so does he present 
 a word. In his hands a word follows its unconventional 
 role just as the butterfly before mentioned followed the 
 stream from the watering-cart ; here in the midst of 
 the 19th century he gave back to the vocabulary all the 
 burning power of the i6th century, whilst the terms 
 used in a new way shone and flamed in the sunlight of 
 the idea. 
 
 I, — But that verbal sensitiveness is a precipice. When 
 Hugo makes an error he errs magnificently. He takes 
 sonorous sounds for arguments and alliterations for 
 proofs, and then he contents himself with puns pure 
 and simple. This happens to him particularly when he 
 assails ideas or those appearances of ideas with which 
 lyrical minds proudly play, such as the briefness of exist- 
 ence, the probability that there is a superior justice, the 
 difficulty of curing oneself of love, the cruel stress of 
 remorse, the delights of liberty and so forth. In such 
 commonplaces as these Hugo's mill grinds away at 
 nothing. He always displaces the same amount of air,
 
 Appe7idix. 227 
 
 whether his subject be beautiful or vulgar, so that his 
 come-downs are simply colossal. 
 
 My Father. — The results are peculiar enough if one 
 conipares the imagination of Hugo with that of Chateau- 
 briand. In the latter there is a combination of verbal 
 sensitiveness and sensitiveness to the period. Particu- 
 larly does he excel in the promptness and lightning-like 
 brilliancy of his descriptive wholes : here a happy and 
 new epithet and there a fine noun, dull and abstract, or 
 gleaming with a low color-note. So does Chateau- 
 briand enchant us. This method is so characteristic of 
 him that any two lines from his works are at once 
 recognizable. 
 
 It seems that the phrase as Chateaubriand uses it has 
 preserved the rhythm and movement of the sea ; the 
 rush of his crises comes from the farthest line of the 
 horizon ; their return is broad, quiet and majestic. An- 
 other example of sensitiveness to the period in writing, 
 Gustave Flaubert, is the only one presenting in the same 
 degree as Chateaubriand that verbal wealth which gives 
 a sensuous satisfaction to one's mind when reading. 
 But it is Normandy over against Brittany. 
 
 I. — One morning, after a wearisome night in the 
 train, how well did I feel that relationship between 
 Chateaubriand and his sublime source of inspiration, the 
 ocean ! I was making a pilgrimage to the crag of the 
 Grand B^. All the horizon of Saint-Malo was powdered 
 with a fine and penetrating rain. Gulls were wailing 
 through the damp air, and along the suburbs of the city, 
 those crooked, green suburbs, the drums of the military 
 school were beating. I seated myself near the balus- 
 trade which guards the splendid sepulchre ; of a cer- 
 tainty that glorious horizon excited me no more than did
 
 2 28 Alphonse Daudet, 
 
 the name etched in the stone. But it caused me to 
 understand him who lay beneath. The author of Rerie^ 
 the bold poet perched at the portal of the 19th century 
 like an eagle on his crag, he at least had the rhythm of 
 the high sea. As in the big sea- shells that were about 
 his bedroom as a child, so in every one of his phrases 
 that humid expanse was condensed, that expanse where 
 the wailing gulls turned and twisted. What I perceive 
 hovering above his literary work is the sky of the ocean, 
 heavy, impenetrable and without limits, that breeder of 
 fogs and misery, that risk-filled sky and melancholy, 
 which is ever mustered by glances of disquiet. Thus did 
 the lighthouse of the French tongue cast its rays over 
 our wretched epoch, as if in the midst of the waves 
 where they tumble in a majestic tumult underneath the 
 vast gray expanse. One's sensations experience an un- 
 expected grandeur whilst traversing the works of that 
 man. Rain, wind, forests and ocean, or by way of con- 
 trast the grandeurs and miseries of human beings, unroll 
 themselves from the depths of his brain and carve pic- 
 tures grandly upon the live rock of the written word. 
 The imagination of that great nomadic bird was ever 
 turned toward his black sun. Death ; it was the thought 
 of death which filled him with melancholy and a disdain 
 so magnificent that the world was darkened thereby, and 
 with a bold and haughty irony which dared to attack yet 
 another glory, the glory of that other eagle there before 
 him : Napoleon. 
 
 Mv Father. — Oh magnificent imagination of Brit- 
 tany, imagination opposed to that of my race, but one 
 that I passionately admire — the ocean, the North and 
 its fogs ! At the dawn of light I drank my glass of 
 brandy in the little yellowish house and then I embarked
 
 Appendix. 229 
 
 on the pilot boat which left the port of Quiberon, and 
 there lay the soul of Brittany all about me . . . {after a 
 viomeni^s thought) Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Renan 
 are the most splendid revolutionists of the century, tre- 
 mendous figures carved in granite upon which the flying 
 scud of glory ever beats ! And those severe images 
 which haunt them are the images that rose from their 
 old, black, heroic country where ocean and mankind 
 forever war upon each other. 
 
 I. — Should we not note here, in those powerful 
 minds, the extraordinary impression which was made by 
 the images which they perceived all about them during 
 their childhood ? Entering into their brains at the time 
 when brains are most impressionable, those images 
 became an integral part of them and developed as they 
 developed. The ocean, sky, forests and mountains, 
 those were their natural outlooks, those the horizons 
 which were destined never to be forgotten. They must 
 have been insinuated into them through the slow atten- 
 tion given them in childhood, or else during those 
 moments of excited feehng which constitute the deeper 
 life of a person. This cloud or that shade in the water, 
 or yonder shape of tree, river or plain, were the phan- 
 toms which haunted them and gave to their work that 
 majesty, that sombre glory which belong only to nature 
 and to them. Guardians of the sublime secrets which 
 the natural world whispers to the child, when they 
 became men they preserved in themselves the eternal 
 majesty of space. 
 
 Thus the words of Chateaubriand give us glimpses of 
 horizons which move us deeply. Thus Victor Hugo has 
 a part in the rose-colored morning, feels the heavy heats 
 of noonday and falls asleep in the golden edge of twi-
 
 230 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 light. That which their little eyes looked upon during 
 the fevers and transports of their years of growth, grew 
 grander with increasing age. Images conjure up 
 images. At first appeared athwart the vague whirlwinds 
 of memory that rose-tinged shore where shadows fall. 
 Thereafter came the melancholy of that moment, and 
 the sensation which is grafted upon it, as when at the 
 barking of the shepherd's dog the staggering sheep 
 creep close together in a flock. And the sensations of 
 early manhood made those pictures only more vivid. 
 When love appeared in the burning heart, of the famous 
 one, it called at first upon all the living forces of early 
 youth, the gladsome awakenings and the days burning 
 with unconscious desires. Since love renders everything 
 more beautiful and rich, it causes the memory to pour 
 forth a multitude of keen and brilliant sensations, which 
 furnish food to prose or poetry. 
 
 A young girl singing as she turns her spinning-wheel 
 — that to the mind of Goethe is the most lively image of 
 chastity and grace. It is an image which returns many 
 a time in his works. If it is Clara waiting for Egmont, 
 or Margaret waiting for Faust, that purring of the 
 spinning-wheel gives the cadence for the amorous 
 attempt. I have always imagined that when he was a 
 child Goethe had that spectacle before him. If one 
 should make a selection in their literary work from the 
 early years of the greatest poets of those parts which 
 relate to imagination, I am sure that the part such 
 things play would astonish people. It would astonish 
 them because we forget the extreme vividness of first 
 sensations ; but although they are benumbed they remain 
 living even in the most ordinary men. And some- 
 times they come of a sudden, returning to inspire old
 
 Appendix. 2 3 1 
 
 age with joy or sorrow at the sight of long- forgotten faces 
 indistinct of feature. 
 
 My Father. — In the case of those whom genius has 
 touched with its wing, such sensations afford a constant 
 happiness. Look at any one of them — Goethe, Hugo, 
 Chateaubriand, Renan — how they turn their heads back- 
 ward with a melancholy smile ! See them bending over 
 their own cradle. But in the most secret part of their 
 souls there are regions which have never been explored, 
 whence their singular dreams mount up. Whatever 
 their little hands have touched, whatever their young 
 eyes have seen, haunts them thereafter, and haunts us. 
 Their finest pages are gemmed with the dews of youth. 
 
 Besides, imagination likes to explore the regions of 
 the unconscious. It plunges into the black depths of our 
 soul and brings forth those miraculous dreams, that 
 which touched and tempted us, and especially that which 
 troubled us when we were making trial of our own 
 senses and were acquainted with but few of the forms 
 of the vast world. 
 
 I. — The first time that I turned the leaves of Hoku- 
 sai's Mangoua, those extraordinary albums where the 
 genius of the most impressionable of all draftsmen has 
 tried its flight, I felt an intuition of the meaning of 
 such wandering forms. Goethe said that our imagina- 
 tion was not able to trace a single line or appearance 
 which did not previously exist in a real and possible 
 state of existence. It might really seem as if Hokusai 
 had found in his own soul quite as much as in the 
 enormous reservoir furnished by nature that sensational 
 crowd of trees, unknown animals, attitudes, movements 
 and objects of which he delivered himself by means 
 of his drawings. Exactly as Balzac and Shakespeare
 
 232 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 did, so this powerful artist traced on paper, not mere 
 copies of the external world, but a series of figures pro- 
 jected from his own brain. When he talks to us about 
 his dreams, and when he puts his wits to work tracing 
 them — and doing it with what vigor and relief ! — we 
 must understand by that that he dreamed Nature. 
 
 My Father. — But is n't that exactly what children 
 do? All the time that the world is blooming about 
 them and offers itself to the delicate tentacles of their 
 senses, a parallel world is boiling within them, a world 
 over which they have in no sense the mastery. The 
 meeting of these two circuits, their combination or 
 mulatiere creates their originality as geniuses. 
 
 And then whatever the imagination of the child has 
 taken hold of, just as it is with the imagination of the 
 artist, is in a state of constant movement. The child 
 and the man of genius see things that have no motion 
 move about. They are struck by accordances and anal- 
 ogies, they perceive that closely woven web in nature 
 where everything has its place and each thing accords 
 one with the other and where the reverse of the weft 
 itself has no deception in it. Because the reverse con- 
 sists of the science and order with which the threads 
 cross each other, whensoever the face of the tapestry 
 itself consists of art and beauty. When Albert Durer 
 places side by side a mass of hair and a falling stream of 
 water, he knits the world together like a child by the 
 employment of such exterior resemblances. 
 
 Such reflections have carried us aside from the poets, 
 but it is right to vagabondize a bit when one is occupied 
 with a wandering faculty. Particularly in our century 
 have there been poetic and literary imaginations of a 
 very strange sort which would fit well in our museum ;
 
 Appendix. • 233 
 
 among the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans still more 
 than among us, I think, because the images in the 
 North, troubled and numberless as they are, growing 
 one from the other, are very different from the images in 
 the South, among which lucidness is never wanting. 
 This is demanded by the Latin law. 
 
 I. — The inheritance of the Aryans has been divided 
 between two great captains. I acknowledge that here- 
 tofore I have accused you of exaggeration when I saw 
 you giving so much importance to questions of race ; but 
 to-day, since my education has broadened, I see very 
 well that you are right. As it always happens, great 
 causes determine great effects, and a theory of little 
 causes — the theory of Cleopatra's nose — is a mystifi- 
 cation, for many other motives would have been neces- 
 sary beside the paradox Pascal has offered, before the 
 whole face of history could have been changed. 
 
 It is by studying the writers, poets and artists in gen- 
 eral that one understands best the influence upon the 
 imagination of latitude. In the North images are 
 tumultuous, heavy and filled with germs of fermenta- 
 tion. Of course one should avoid too easy analogies, 
 but the Valkyrs of god Woden who fill every point of 
 the compass with their furious galloping are in good 
 sooth the daughters of the mists. Just to quote a poet 
 haphazard — the distance between the poems of Robert 
 Browning and those of Fr^d^ric Mistral, that is pretty 
 much the difference. 
 
 Mv Father. — - Beyond everything else the Southern 
 imagination is violent and rapid j but in its greatest 
 frenzy it keeps in touch with reason and holds solidly 
 thereto. Its lucidness is sometimes more apparent 
 than real. There are cool springs whose limpid waters
 
 234 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 mask their depth. In any case it never becomes intoxi- 
 cated with itself. There is nothing of the somnam- 
 buUst, nothing of the artificial in it. It remains always 
 sticking close to life. Sometimes writers of a Southern 
 race have attempted to tear themselves away from their 
 natural temperament in order to be misty, abstruse and 
 symbolical. But there comes their Latin clarity to 
 bridle them, envelop and restrain them, forcing them 
 to remain within the limits of the comprehensible, no 
 matter what they may desire ! These contortions amuse 
 me. Unquestionably the hypothesis of limpid horizons 
 which oblige the imagination to stay ev^er transparent 
 and direct seems commonplace. But is it not a right 
 hypothesis and one not to be gainsaid? 
 
 But apart from questions of race, and on parallel lines 
 with them, what is more amusing and side-splitting than 
 the case of Ne'pomucene Lemercier, the author of the 
 Panhypocrisiade ? Certainly he was a man of imagina- 
 tion, but of Latin imagination. And the more the 
 wretched fellow tried to escape from clearness and the 
 basic qualities of his own intelligence, the more did 
 the tapes of commonsense bind him down and make him 
 impossible for any artistic diversions. He was strange, 
 it is true, but his strangeness was classic, obedient 
 to rules and regulations, forced into an extraordinary 
 mold. 
 
 The imagination of the North, and I beg you to 
 understand that there is no fault-finding in my words, 
 is on the contrary in its essential nature complex. 
 Without question it would have been impossible for 
 Carlyle, as well as Browning, or Jean-Paul Richter, or 
 Walt Whitman, to express himself in a transparent 
 fashion. Those subterranean analogies of which we
 
 Appendix. 235 
 
 spoke just now, that obscure network of the universe pos- 
 sessed them to the point of madness. The beauties in 
 their works are like torches waved with tremendous 
 power in the blackest shade. 
 
 Carlyle's explanations, like those made by Jean-Paul, 
 only make the blackness blacker. Tliese men move 
 with ease in a mysterious land. Similar sounds, words 
 and formulas that seem to clash, analogies and allitera- 
 tions take on a sibylline aspect in their style and are the 
 source of perpetual dreams. 
 
 I. — But, as a Latin, do you not feel a sort of repul- 
 sion or compulsory shrinking from such masses of sym- 
 bols and from those precious stones in which truths and 
 enigmas of color are as it were in suspension ? 
 
 My Blather. — I have moments when those troublous 
 images seduce me too. I understand marvellously well 
 how a certain class of minds should delight in them and 
 refuse every other nourishment. They render one's 
 palate blase, and everything else seems tasteless. I 
 only find fault with the fact that obscurity often only 
 covers some matter of very little importance which 
 would not attract attention if it were transposed into 
 simple terms. When a whirlwind of ideas and impres- 
 sions falls upon poets, it is allowable in them to translate 
 those ideas and impressions in that sequence under 
 which they present themselves, lucky enough to be able 
 to fix the mystery thus forever. What is to be objected 
 to very strongly is the habit of intentionally obscuring 
 one's language. 
 
 But for a Northern imagination there are plenty of 
 ways of being cloudy and yet sincere. Now it is an 
 analogy, or all the glittering following of some word or 
 some thought, which carries away pen and mind. Again
 
 236 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 it is a poet like Swinburne for example, who digs down 
 until he arrives at black and unexplored regions where 
 his own little smoky lamp alone can guide him. In one 
 case lyrical impressions present themselves to the mind 
 with a tremendous tumult and a rising of the mists 
 which he who translates them respects. In another 
 case extreme brevity and a praiseworthy attempt to 
 make a formula precise and rare bring together words of 
 a narrow and hard meaning, which one finds great diffi- 
 culty in breaking up. 
 
 Lovers of the shadowy are right in alleging that we 
 are surrounded with mystery, or, to use the charming 
 excuse made by St^phane Mallarm^, that one has to 
 ivrite with black on a white ground. But is there not a 
 primordial convention without which a work of art 
 would become impossible, according to which one must 
 believe oneself in possession of a certain stability and 
 light, certain laws in whose shelter the book, drama or 
 painting flourish, before one attempts to tell the story, 
 paint the picture, or make oneself manifest in any man- 
 ner whatsoever? That which causes obscurity in some 
 people is the fact that they make everything uncertain 
 in their first sentence ; after that they move along in an 
 artificial and terribly complex world, in which words 
 have an unexpected meaning and sonorous sounds at- 
 tract or repel each other and everything happens just 
 as it does in dreams where no will acts as guide to 
 appearances and acts and everything floats in a sea of 
 the inexplicable. 
 
 I. — By way of the names of Hokusa'i and Albert 
 Diirer we have reached the question of Imagination 
 among draftsmen and painters. There are two fields of 
 feeling here quite distinct one from the other, that of
 
 Appe7tdix. 237 
 
 line and that of colo7- — Leonardo da Vinci and Rem- 
 brandt for example. 
 
 My Father. — One primary and important observa- 
 tion — the duel between light and color, to which in his 
 Italian Painting as well as in his Flemish Painting 
 Taine seems to me to have failed to give enough atten- 
 tion. The antagonism there is a real one. The most 
 vivid image of this question, so far as I am concerned, 
 consisted of a flower from Spain which happened to be 
 placed in the yard of that little house formerly occupied 
 by Eugene Delacroix, which we were then occupying. 
 When evening came and the sun gradually died out that 
 flower and shrub flamed like the host above the altar. 
 
 I. — That remark receives confirmation through a 
 visit I made to a certain great museum in the North, 
 that of Amsterdam. The Rembrandts, the Halses, the 
 Terburgs, the Vermeers of Delft have been the real kings 
 of color. A low and gray sky, or else some snow-filled 
 heaven corresponds especially well with the delightful 
 shades of color in houses and canals in their country. 
 In such, circumstances colors spring forth with a most 
 extraordinary violence. One can believe that in a cer- 
 tain way they have forced the eyes of painters and 
 aided in the formation of the earliest pioneers among 
 the realists. 
 
 As to the imagination, it exists there in details, exact- 
 itude and intensity. Rembrandt imagined a special 
 world of his own, containing a warm and sumptuous 
 atmosphere in which a shadow has the soft heaviness of 
 velvet ; with him faces and bodies are always placed 
 just at the intersection of this light and this shade, in 
 such case that they offer an alternation of gold and dark 
 red and shadows.
 
 238 Alphonse Daudet, 
 
 However dangerous and deceiving parallels may be, 
 it does not seem to me that those were wrong who com- 
 pared the imagination of Rembrandt to the imagination 
 of Shakespeare. Just like the Dutch painter, the Eng- 
 lish playwright has an atmosphere entirely his own, 
 which is like some emanation from his genius ; and his 
 characters play alternately from a golden richness to a 
 deep black, which causes them to approach those un- 
 forgettable captains of the " Ronde de Nuit " and those 
 stupefying " Drapiers." Virtues and vices, kindnesses 
 and brutality, dreams and acts, perform in his case the 
 duties of light and shade. 
 
 Another series of reflections came to me, but always 
 with regard to Rembrandt, when I made a visit to the 
 museum at Madrid and mentally compared the marvels 
 there with the marvels in the Amsterdam Museum. It 
 seemed to me that the imagination of Velasquez and 
 Rembrandt differed radically and completely from each 
 other. That shows itself in the different way each had 
 of arranging their masterpiece. Just go up to the por- 
 trait of his mother by the Dutch master and see if you 
 can find any traces of work or excitement or vibration 
 of the brush. No effort, no suggestion of subjectivity, 
 if one may use pedantic language, is to be seen. The 
 painter has reproduced life in its full relief and warmth, 
 but he has remained impersonal, and that life which he 
 has depicted is covered with a glaze under which the 
 traces of labor are no longer visible. 
 
 On the contrary, walk up to the " Fileuses " by Velas- 
 quez ; whatever of carefully directed brutality, subtle 
 vehemence and restrained audacity show themselves to 
 the observer through the furious play of the brush, the 
 frenzied spread of the impasto, the sudden jets of gray,
 
 Appendix. 239 
 
 rose and black — those burning and dead colors the secret 
 of which he carried off with him — whatever of such 
 things the brain of a man of genius can contain, spring 
 to the sight. In the presence of that magnificent " go " 
 a kind of hallucination befalls one. The artist seems 
 to be caught at work. One seems to see him painting 
 a hand which moves, painting it in five strokes of the 
 brush, or bringing out an embroidery by a few scratches 
 of his palette knife, or inclosing in a pearl the reflection 
 of some figure, or in some figure the reflection of a race. 
 
 Are there not two distinct forms there clearly and de- 
 cisively apart — are there not two opposing inspirations 
 there ? When Rembrandt had finished that portrait of 
 his mother, Rembrandt had disappeared. But in the 
 canvas of the " Fileuses " Velasquez is always there. 
 He shows the secrets of his method and seems to defy 
 those who are to follow him. 
 
 My Father. — According to that, his imagination 
 would be nearer of a kind to Frans Hals, whose tremen- 
 dous " go " is equally plain. I recall a dining room 
 entirely hung with panels by this master. It was life 
 itself. 
 
 I. — Ah that little museum of Haarlem opposite the 
 church on the little provincial square ! Seated about a 
 table at some excuse for a meeting of an archery club 
 are all the varieties of human sensuality, bold and mani- 
 fest in their several types. There 's representative ima- 
 gination pushed to the point of paroxysm ! The timid 
 man, the arrogant, the savage, and the man who is 
 conciliatory, and the man who hates his neighbor in 
 secret ! 
 
 The old regents of the club near by with their wrinkled 
 faces and trembling hands signify the decay of the
 
 240 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 human body, the slow usage and decline of life. One of 
 them exceptionally has an unctuous and waxen face 
 with a veritable patina on it which makes it look like 
 old ivory. Frans Hals more than any other artist has 
 proved that it is possible to be symbolical by giving an 
 exact representation of reality. 
 
 My Father. — I am thinking of another painter, this 
 time a Spaniard, but one who had an extraordinary 
 sensitiveness for cruelty and pain, and was possessed 
 with an overwhelming imagination . . . Goya. All the 
 while that he spends his wit on bull fights and fills the 
 black shadows with figures of enthusiastic spectators, 
 whilst the principal actor, squat and black, while the 
 beast hurls itself ahead, while the fatal trumpets blow — 
 all the time that he carves with his pitiless and savage 
 burin the " Horrors of War," bloody scenes from the 
 Inquisition, monks with mouths distended by a holy 
 ferocity — all the while that he trifles with the elegancies, 
 caprices and perverted smiles of little rosy faces, he 
 remains anguished and cruel through the force of reality, 
 and even through the force of color, which runs through 
 all the shades of blood whether dry or fluid, in jets or 
 sheets or blotches. He represents a barbarous epoch. 
 
 I. — If we leave to one side the technical imagination 
 of painters in so far as it touches drawing and color, the 
 other portion of their minds seems for the most part to 
 be somewhat akin to the dramatic art. But according 
 to my idea Rembrandt and Velasquez are not in their 
 moved and decorative pictures at the best of their genius. 
 Marvellously do they render the perpetual static drama 
 of existence, that namely which lurks in a smile, a finely 
 twisted mouth, a gesture, or even for example some 
 window through which we see an interior, a garden, a
 
 Appendix- 241 
 
 knot of people assembled, or else a single person, a 
 clown, a court jester, a philosopher, or in a princess or 
 in a horse. There is a general theory spread among 
 men of the profession that painting should not express 
 ideas. Rather does it seem that painting should express 
 ideas after its own fashion ; the imagination of great 
 painters can be just as rich and excited as those of great 
 playwrights. Painting has the advantage of restoring 
 for us the speechless, motionless and intervening part of 
 the drama or irony of life, that part, namely, which the 
 drama can legitimately make real because it is always in 
 movement and sounding. But at certain moments the 
 arts approach each other and merge one into the other. 
 That is why the plays of Ibsen, with their characters who 
 keep silence for long moments and are so preoccupied 
 with looks and the fleeting aspect of things and with 
 their own changelessness, are not entirely without con- 
 nection with the pictures of the great Holland epoch, 
 for the latter are an apotheosis of intimate and interior 
 life — among which some lives indeed include so large a 
 proportion of the tragical ! 
 
 The imagination excites itself most vividly when it 
 receives very little material, but that material sincere and 
 arranged in proper order. In all the modern theatre 
 is there a single scene more impressive than that 
 assemblage of merchants, than that council of regents 
 about a table? What are they at? We do not know 
 what it is that these men with heads like cats, these old 
 men with weasel heads are discussing. What moves us 
 is the expression of their faces. Notwithstanding their 
 speechlessness, a flood of profound utterance, a dialogue 
 in Shakespeare's manner seems to us to flow from those 
 mouths with thin and yet ruddy Ups. 
 
 16
 
 242 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 My Father. — Ambulatory life shows us a similai 
 dramatic side in the swiftly passing spectacles of the 
 street or the fields. An old man reading at a window 
 or a balcony, an old woman grafting her rose bushes, a 
 young man and young girl seated at twilight on a ter- 
 race, a peasant in his field — all these human beings 
 bowed down by the monotony of their life are so many 
 interior images whose leaves we turn in our reveries. 
 Without willing it we create concerning and about them 
 little stories. We fabricate the circumstances ; and I 
 believe that artists can never be too rich in visions of this 
 sort. These guide artists toward truth of rendering, 
 right slant of the light, the expression of faces, char- 
 acteristic attitudes, calm gestures and looks ; the bringing 
 together of all these elements brings beauty into life. 
 For my part I have never ceased feeding my imagina- 
 tion with such spectacles. Many of them have re- 
 mained so vivid in my memory that I no longer know 
 whether they belong to art or life. 
 
 I. — Dutch painting makes me think of one of the most 
 singular phenomena of the history of art and therefore of 
 imagination. There are epochs in which minds are exer- 
 cised in favor of painting, as in the seventeenth century in 
 Holland, or for the dramatic art, as in the sixteenth century 
 in England and in Spain, and in the seventeenth century 
 in France. All of a sudden we are face to face with a 
 simultaneous blossoming out of very dissimilar geniuses, 
 but all of them abounding in power, all marked by love 
 of life and forms, all observers of windows. That may 
 last twenty, thirty or forty years, and one masterpiece 
 follows another ; art passes on with giant strides, refines 
 itself here and excites itself there and shines with in- 
 comparable splendor. Then all of a sudden an unknown
 
 Appendix. 243 
 
 hand takes away the torches. Queen Mab flies with her 
 little laugh. The shadows darken down. Feeling for 
 life is lost. Behold the reign of flat works, of allegories 
 and imitations ! After Rembrandt comes Lairesse. 
 After Racine, behold Voltaire ! How explain such 
 changes as these ? 
 
 My Father. — Enough to state them. In the most 
 gifted man sensitiveness is not forever. In an artist 
 those wretched hours " without grace " as I call them, 
 are very frequent, and to be compared to that dryness of 
 soul feared by theologians. Do not the physiologists 
 demonstrate that there exists 2i periodic insensibility of the 
 heart 1 It is to be noted that such phases follow 
 periods of excitement, periods of those intoxicated 
 moments when nature gives up her secrets. What takes 
 place in the individual is doubtless repeated by the race. 
 Imaginations have need of periods of silence and rest. 
 Then it is that the torch of Lucretius falls by the way. 
 
 I. — There is one art which has been silent a long 
 while, yet is the most impressive of all, since it consists 
 of history fixed in place, I mean architecture. You 
 know the saying : sto?ies no longer speak. Who will ever 
 explain to us why at a certain given period the soil of 
 Europe began to bristle with a harvest of churches 
 which raised the voice of faith toward the sky? Out- 
 side the pale of religion there were always palaces and 
 magnificent buildings and even most curious dwellings of 
 citizens. All that is gone. In some unknown city a 
 haphazard stroll by twilight, which mercifully softens the 
 actual ugliness of the scene, permits us to divine the old 
 lyrical beauties of architecture like gray, antique lace ; 
 but, for our contemporaries, there 's a sense dead and 
 gone !
 
 244 Alpho7ise Daudet. 
 
 My Father. — That is not true for music at least. . . . 
 Wagner was a phenomenon in this century just as he 
 will be one in the time to come, and no one is more 
 fruitful than he in remarks of every sort. 
 
 He was a man belonging to another age. Neverthe- 
 less he found a way to our nerves and our brains far 
 more easily than one would have thought. If imagina- 
 tion has representatives he was one of the giants. A 
 Northern imagination, it is true, on which all the beauties 
 and faults of the North have left their impress. He 
 insists, he insists with violence and tenacity, he insists so 
 pitilessly ! He is afraid that we have n't understood. 
 That language of motives which he has imagined and of 
 which he makes such a magnificent use has the fault of 
 leaving us very often with an impression of weariness 
 and satiety. It becomes a veritable cause for suffering 
 in the case of his many and odious imitators, because 
 nothing is so terrible as ideas imposed by another, noth- 
 ing is worse than routine. 
 
 Still, it was absolutely necessary for him to invent that 
 system of motives in order to utter that connection be- 
 tween the drama and music realized by him, a connec- 
 tion so perfect that his characters seem to us clothed in 
 sound. Besides, these motives ally them in an irresist- 
 ible way, sometimes a happy way, with the grand cir- 
 cumstances of life and their destiny. And finally they 
 express those mysterious things which remain unex- 
 pressed but understood in the libretto. 
 
 In Richard Wagner the imagination is so representa- 
 tive and violent that it saturates his work to overflowing 
 with all the sounds of nature and leaves a Umited space 
 for the episodes. The passion between Tristan and 
 Isolde plunges into the tumult of the ocean which over-
 
 Appendix. 245 
 
 whelms it, then it appears on the surface, then it 
 plunges under again. One invincible power raises the 
 waves and the souls by a single movement. In the 
 poem of Wagner, water, fire, the woods, the blossoming 
 and mystic meadow, the holy spot become the more 
 powerful characters. In this paganism of to-day all 
 nature has become divine. 
 
 Your generation is accustomed to these splendors, this 
 torrent of heroism and life, but you cannot present to 
 your fancy the impression which that music exercised 
 on men of my age. In cold truth it transformed us. It 
 renovated the atmosphere of art. Then it was that I 
 understood the vanity of all those discussions concerning 
 realism, lyricism and symbolism. There is everything in 
 Wagner, and in everything he is admirable, because 
 there is nothing in him which is pedantic or intention- 
 ally low. Turning his face toward Gayety he wrote the 
 Meister singer, turning toward Pain, Love, Death, the 
 Mutter of Goethe, he wrote Tnstan und Isolde. 
 He made use of the entire human piano-forte, and 
 the entire superhuman piano-forte. Cries, tears, the 
 distortion of despair, the trickling of water over rocks, 
 the sough of the wind in the trees, the frightful remorse 
 for incest, the song of the shepherd and the trumpets of 
 war — his tremendous imagination is always at white 
 heat, and always ready. 
 
 That imagination of his, excessive and feverish, has 
 not only renovated music but has also overwhelmed 
 poetry and philosophy. Although theories disquiet me, 
 still I feel them trembling in Wagner behind each one 
 of his heroes. The gods talk of their destiny and of the 
 conflict of that destiny with the destiny of men, they 
 talk of ancient Fate in a way that is sometimes obscure,
 
 246 Alp house Daudet. - 
 
 but with a rush and go that make one forget to question 
 them. It is the famous wall of the Ligende des 
 Stecles, crowded with tubas and the trumpets of Sachs, 
 tumultuous and glittering in their mass. 
 
 I. — Do you think it would be possible to analyze the 
 imagination of a man of that sort? 
 
 My Father. — Everything can be analyzed, but it 
 would be a pity to take the divinity down from a 
 pedestal. Let his methods remain in the dark like his 
 orchestra ; his sensitiveness, which was one of a special 
 kind, seems to me before everything else legeitdary. It 
 is quite possible that he desired to have characters of a 
 size suitable to their surroundings, and that one would 
 feel uncomfortable while considering ordinary men who 
 should be victims to the Ocean of Tristan, or to the 
 Forest of Siegfried. What difference does it make? 
 He succeeds in moving us with these superterrestrial 
 passions. In Tristan humanity has a larger part. 
 Those are our own wounds which are bleeding in the 
 flesh of the lovers, wounds that the sacred spear, which 
 the hero brings back with him, shall never heal. 
 
 I. — I have heard amateurs of music uphold the fol- 
 lowing thesis — that the musical imagination has no need 
 of the dramatic element in so far as it is manifested by 
 the characters and passions : " The drama " say they 
 " lies in music itself and the architectural development 
 of the different parts of a symphony in which everything 
 holds its place, binds and helps the one the other, and 
 produces a veritable construction of sounds. The 
 classic phases of the symphony are modelled with a 
 truly Platonic sagacity upon the movements of the soul 
 whensoever a vivid emotion powerfully shakes that soul 
 and the latter sings its agony after the wound has been
 
 Appendix. 247 
 
 received. Andante, Adagio, Allegro, Scherzo, Finale — 
 those are the stages of sensibility which philosophers 
 did not invent and which correspond to the sublimest 
 reality, an intuition for which only belongs from age to 
 age to a few privileged persons." 
 
 I am ready to adhere to that opinion whenever I hear 
 a symphony of Beethoven. It even seems to me that at 
 that moment my emotion includes a deeper and rarer 
 quality than it does when listening to a fragment of the 
 Tetralogy. 
 
 My Father. — It were better to say that the master- 
 piece by Beethoven being more concentrated and closely 
 woven makes a total impression upon you in a much 
 shorter time than does a drama with its necessary stops 
 and changes of scenery and delays for explanation. 
 Now it is necessary in our study to give a large measure 
 of consideration to the element of duration. 
 
 There are some people cast in a lighter metal who 
 immediately begin to vibrate and emit a sound of en- 
 thusiasm which quickly stops even as it was produced. 
 There are others of a thick and resisting bronze who 
 retain the transmitted vibrations. There are minds 
 which are slow to put themselves in motion, lazy imagi- 
 nations which, when they have once been persuaded 
 and captivated, will not easily abandon that object which 
 has been given them for food. They transform it in a 
 thousand ways. It has entered so deeply into their being 
 that there is no longer a fear that it will escape. It 
 has become part of themselves and of their individual 
 structure. With people of that sort, apparently massive 
 in their make, the phenomena of the outer world assist 
 a genius powerfully, since they slip into the flesh and 
 blood of the artist and undergo there his own vicissitudes.
 
 248 Alphoiise Daudet. 
 
 It thus happens that many creators have a tremendous 
 but restricted originaUty. With them everything turns 
 to intensity. Everything that reaches them from the 
 outside suffers at once the changes of their individual 
 rules and impressions ; whilst others have a far broader 
 field of humanity which can be ploughed and sowed 
 throughout its entire extent. It seems to me that 
 Beethoven belongs to the former category. 
 
 In relation to him you spoke of " Platonic sagacity." 
 The state of soul to which Plato has given his name 
 might well merit a place to itself in our little work. 
 Platonism would mean that the imagination submits 
 itself to laws which would give it more energy whilst 
 moderating and guiding it. 
 
 A person who feels a powerful impression and who is 
 gifted with extreme sensibility is naturally inclined to 
 restore that immediate impression to the world in the 
 shape of some work of art, some picture, poem or 
 symphony. The method is entirely instinctive and it 
 causes our brain to be a veritable vat in which fermen- 
 tation goes on. It captures the quick admiration of 
 those who require violent emotions, and that is the 
 greater number of men. But there is a great class of 
 artists, painters and philosophers who will not admit 
 that the mind is not influenced by a rhythm and does 
 not obey a certain harmony, which represent a higher 
 condition and the beauty of human intelligence. What 
 Plato taught to his disciples was measure, that is to say 
 a mental equilibrium which has a perfect horror of 
 monsters and will not be satisfied with a hasty and con- 
 fused improvisation. 
 
 The state of mind which has been named for Plato 
 and of which he was certainly the finest example is
 
 Appendix^ 249 
 
 brought forth by that same self-control, by those deep 
 ponderings which are destined to purify images and by 
 that intimate and rich arrangement which puts the 
 bridle upon lyricism ; this moral state is found again in 
 literature at all ages and throughout the entire field of 
 art. It is found in Beethoven. It furnishes the artist 
 with a mysterious and well-contained beauty and a wider 
 action upon the human soul, because that which it 
 creates is subjected to deep-going movements, to the 
 rhythmical motion of the human soul at the time that it 
 is filled with noble thoughts. 
 
 Happy are those beings of imagination compact who 
 have known how to control their own mental images 
 and have not allowed the tumultuous products of their 
 brain to escape from them like a torrent that often rolls 
 down mud ! Such concentration and self-mastery make 
 a long duration of admiration certain, one hardly knows 
 why. It is will knit to intelligence, it includes also the 
 power of order and equilibrium. 
 
 To return to music ; with respect to that, I own to the 
 infirmity or the virtue that I love it so much, I find it 
 difficult to make a selection. I love military music pass- 
 ing down the road, the thunder of the . sea, the gale 
 through the pines. What puts me into an enthusiastic 
 condition with Richard Wagner is just that impression- 
 ability of his for every sound in nature ; how that same 
 nature does saturate and overwhelm his work, as it were 
 with the force of a hurricane ! His orchestral parts 
 cradle and swing me to and fro. His gentleness and 
 his power cause me to pass within a few hours through 
 the most powerful emotions, emotions in fact for 
 which no one can fail to be grateful forever to the man 
 who has excited them, because they reveal our inner
 
 250 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 depths to ourselves, I love and admire Beethoven also 
 for the wide and peaceful landscapes which he knows 
 how to open up in the soul of sound, in what I am in 
 the habit of calling " the other planet." Italian music 
 enchants me and in Rossini I experience that extraor- 
 dinary impression of melancholy anguish which an excess 
 of life gives us. There is too much frenzy, too much 
 movement ; it is as if one were trying to escape from 
 death. I adore Mendelssohn and his delicious pictures 
 of nature, such as the Symphonie Romaine and the 
 Symphotiie Ecossaise. There are certain hours toward 
 nightfall when the soul of Schumann torments me. . . . 
 But to number them all would be never to end. I have 
 lived through the power of music \ I am a dweller upon 
 its planet. 
 
 I. — It seems to me that we have brought back some 
 useful observations from our rapid incursion into the 
 arts. But the arts are not all alike. There are men in 
 whom imagination is forever bridled by their will. They 
 are interesting for us to observe, because in such cases 
 we see that same faculty warring with another faculty 
 which constrains and limits it. 
 
 Happy are they who are able to manifest clearly those 
 sentiments which move them and cause the world to 
 partake of their transports ! As you have remarked in 
 a celebrated phrase, the imagination of the orator has 
 like everything else its license, its broad play-space, its 
 free development. It increases its power through that 
 special kind of intoxication which comes to the orator 
 from the listeners and fills him constantly with new 
 energy. The length of time is of special importance 
 when it comes to this. For rapidity is its first necessity, 
 since the man who uses his imagination in public must
 
 Appendix. 251 
 
 before everything else imagine quickly ami truly. Truly, 
 that is to say, in the way and with the aid of formulas 
 capable of impressing those who listen to him. More- 
 over the art of oratory is unfortunately too often nothing 
 but an avalanche of commonplaces, because the rem- 
 nants of the mind generally present themselves first to 
 one's memory. 
 
 But what is of greater importance to our study of the 
 phenomena of oratory is the imagination in the man of 
 action. If he is tormented by this great faculty, the 
 man of action will surely suffer deceptions and dissatis- 
 factions incomparable, since he is forced to be realistic. 
 The result is that with him the imaginative act has less 
 importance than the means to arrive at a result. And 
 it is the equilibrium of these two endeavors that con- 
 stitutes the fate of the hero, just as Carlyle says. 
 
 We know well enough what the poet or the orator or 
 the writer sees during his spectral revelations of imagina- 
 tion — words and sounds that his spirit can grasp, and, 
 higher up, strange ideas which are in constant change of 
 form because they are about to enter into very varied 
 bodies, — splendid costumes — a traversing of seasons 
 and climes — merging and mixing with others — carry- 
 ing crowds with them — rousing up memories of the 
 past ! And in good sooth there is nothing more de- 
 lightful for the mind than to follow up the life of an 
 image, its longer or shorter existence, its origin from the 
 moment it forms itself in the brain of its master to the 
 time when, having moved about the world and having 
 realized its power, it falls into the common reservoir of 
 show-case beauties, beauties which have no longer any 
 effective action. 
 
 We know also how the painter sees when he paints
 
 252 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 and the musician when he composes. At any rate we 
 have in regard to such creative states of mind certain 
 notions and testimony which we enlarge into theories 
 and which satisfy our intellectual laziness. 
 
 But on the other hand that of which we completely 
 lack knowledge is the manner in which mental images 
 comport themselves in the man of action. Certain 
 recent philosophical hypotheses concerning which we 
 must soon vex ourselves attribute an effective power to 
 mental images. It is certain that when alive and active 
 they tend constantly to become real. According to 
 Fouill^e's phrase, they are '■'■matrices" A beautiful 
 picture, a lovely symphony, a magnificent bit of litera- 
 ture do not only infuse power into us ; such things drag us 
 along in their wake and put us into a mental condition 
 as close as possible to themselves. It is thus that war- 
 like songs and the rolling of drums pour heroism into 
 the hearts of citizens. 
 
 If you would only accept the characterizations and 
 definitions of metaphysics I would gladly say that the 
 man of action is he in whom metital images have the 
 strongest tendency to becojne real. 
 
 My Father. — My fear of philosophy does not go to 
 the length of causing me to reject a formula without 
 examination which is at least convenient. What I 
 object to in your definition is the fact that it eludes 
 the difficulty and gets out of the scrape by the use of 
 words. 
 
 Let us look at an example, the grandest and most 
 striking of this century. Napoleon. And then at another, 
 Bismarck. And again at a third, Stanley. Our modern 
 epoch which is reproached for the poorness of its blood 
 seems to me nevertheless a privileged period so far as
 
 Appeiidix. 253 
 
 the existence of heroes is concerned, for these three are 
 characteristic. 
 
 The closest to me is Napoleon. His Southern race 
 is the reason why I can class him best, because his for- 
 mulas touch me better and his means are a little 
 clearer to me. 
 
 It seems that his imagination, like his will, was exces- 
 sive, ceaseless and I might say frightful. Above all 
 things it was tenacious, and in spite of his celebrated 
 phrase it did not altogether die at Saint- Jean-d'Acre. 
 What kept him in motion and roused him always was his 
 sensibility with regard to glory and authority. The 
 example of the grand captains and leaders of peoples 
 were forever present in his thoughts. He quotes and 
 invokes them, never will he admit discussion about 
 them. He is a Latin to the very marrow, through his 
 mental uprightness, through his lucidity, through his 
 judgment. There are even moments when he shows 
 himself a Philistine, and he the enthusiast appears 
 timid in the name of enthusiasm and fears the results of 
 first impulses. It very seldom happens that passion and 
 imagination are not connected and up to a certain 
 point parallel. Now this " imaginative " was a grand 
 creature of passion. We might have doubted it a little, 
 but the researches made by Frederic Masson have made 
 the light upon this point absolutely clear. 
 
 Well, in a brain like that, the most insensate and 
 grandiose, the most unlimited projects wing their way in 
 flaming line. I do not in the least believe that he con- 
 fined his desires to that which he believed he could 
 realize. His desire and his mental images march far 
 before him and his will follows them far behind — en- 
 raged against himself and others about him whenever he
 
 254 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 did not reach its aim, and yet at the same time calcu- 
 lating chances of success with an energy and a hare- 
 brained audacity and a tenacity in application which 
 have never had their equal in this world. Whenever he 
 secured a triumph, whenever he satisfied his own ambi- 
 tion on any point, triumph and ambition had already 
 been discounted a long while. And, as we have positive 
 witness, they no longer gave him any pleasure. Alas, 
 that is the fault of the imagination in activity ! It 
 devours the crop when in the green shoot and the 
 result always seems piteously inferior to the desire. 
 
 I once had a friend who, notwithstanding that he was 
 always lucky in whatever he attempted, was always con- 
 stantly morose. He adored travels. When he was 
 about to undertake one he talked without end about it 
 and for a long while before he left. He surrounded 
 himself with guide books and information. He asked 
 questions of every one he could. You would find him 
 seated in the midst of charts, plans and photographs. 
 But at the very moment of starting he had already 
 enjoyed all his pleasure. His imagination was a lively 
 one and in that way became a constant scourge. If he 
 undertook anything, he represented to himself alter- 
 nately success or failure with such a power that neither 
 the one nor the other could give him the slightest sensa- 
 tion when they came. On this little side of his my 
 friend recalled to me the Great Emperor, the Unamusa- 
 ble. " I have yawned my way through life ! " cried 
 Chateaubriand, who was another powerful imaginative. 
 
 What strikes and moves us, moreover, in the mental 
 conceptions of Bonaparte was his rapidity and univer- 
 sality. Roederer shows us the Emperor at the State 
 Council occupying himself with everything, a man of
 
 Appendix. 255 
 
 detail to an excessive degree, following out every ques- 
 tion in all particulars, calling for replies, making notes, 
 classifying and asking the advice of inventive minds. 
 And it is the same everywhere and always, whether in his 
 armchair or on the battlefield — what disconcerts us is 
 the going to work of an imagination of admirable supple- 
 ness, one which facts could never repulse. 
 
 Which facts could never repulse. That imagination of 
 Bonaparte differed in this particular from any others 
 which have been perhaps more surprising than his own 
 but have engaged with other objects or projects that 
 lie beyond and outside of reality. After all, clever 
 turns of thought are easy enough when they are com- 
 pared with that long patience which is able to make 
 something actual. 
 
 And in fact Napoleon was very much incensed with 
 those persons whose grindstones turn on nothing, with 
 those useless windmills ! If he had a detestation of 
 ideologues, it was because such people represent lost 
 strength, and nothing irritated that great man like 
 bungled work and failure. One is sometimes ready to 
 ask whether he was wrong after all, considering the 
 abuse which people make nowadays of words and 
 formulas. For my part I feel a , certain displeasure 
 when I see human thought flying wide of humanity and 
 spending so much power in hollow speculations. 
 
 I. — Do you not think that the imagination of meta- 
 physicians has its own distant utility? It seems to me 
 that in that mist where they move great events prepare 
 themselves. There is no doubt that it represents the 
 disquiet which attends an epoch. Deprived of imme- 
 diate objects on which to work, or disdaining them, 
 thought takes itself for its own study. There is a revo-
 
 256 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 lutionary virtue in the constant questioning which she 
 causes all problems to undergo ; let us avoid dissimula- 
 tion ; a perpetual state of revolution is the best state for 
 the brain. Ideas which congeal and fix themselves 
 solidly become authoritative and odious. The Church 
 has not been alone in offering an example of a philosophy 
 of liberty which supplies weapons to despotism. All 
 principles have a tendency to become immovable and 
 play the tyrant to their victims. Metaphysics have this 
 thing in their favor that they engage with the radical 
 principles themselves and at the very moment when the 
 latter think that they are victorious, destroy them and 
 give place to others. 
 
 Let us not separate, if so you please, the imagination 
 of ideas from the imagination of acts. The hatred of 
 Napoleon for Ideology must not make us forget that he 
 himself fought in honor of an Ideology, namely his own, 
 and that he wished to impose it upon the universe. 
 
 My Father. — That man was a veritable element 
 himself and the elements alone were able to draw 
 bounds and limits for him ; heat in Spain and cold in 
 Russia said to him : " Farther than this thou shalt not 
 go." The man who reaches such summits of power is 
 intoxicated by his sudden ascension ; his outlook does 
 not extend in accordance with the heights to which he 
 rises \ it is only his desire which increases. 
 
 After everything has been considered, if it were neces- 
 sary to give a sub-title to the history of Napoleon, that 
 sub-title might perhaps be " Or the Man of Imagi- 
 nation." What he actually realized in his short and 
 frantic life is a warrant for us concerning what he 
 dreamed. How many dreams must have gone to pro- 
 duce a single act!
 
 Appendix. 257 
 
 Note in passing the extraordinary attraction vvhicli 
 imaginatives exercise one upon the other. They trail 
 each other by the scent. They divine each other and 
 understand each other with half a word ; they are all 
 ready to help each other. 
 
 Up to now we have been considering as the represent- 
 atives of that/aa///i' which delivers only the artists, phil- 
 osophers and men of action, in a word the great men 
 who are the representatives of the lofty imagination. 
 Our reckoning would not be complete if we took no ac- 
 count ol types ot the loiver ifuagination. 
 
 Such types are numberless ; we rub elbows with them 
 every day. I thought it was my duty to give them an 
 important place in my work. In his dramas like The 
 IVi/d Duck Ibsen has also interested himself in them. 
 Some are found in the novels of Dickens and those of 
 Tourgudnieflf; and I certainly forget others. 
 
 Many who are imprisoned by the realities of life do 
 not for that reason lose their illusions. Like people 
 plunged in hallucinations they march on in their wretch- 
 edness, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, always expecting 
 the inheritance or the extraordinary chance in the 
 lottery, or the kind gentleman who comes their way and 
 adopts them, or the lady who calls to her coachman : 
 " Halt ! " and turning to the foot passenger, " Get in, this 
 is your own carriage ! " Admirable hopes are these, 
 which help to make all evils bearable. Those who carry 
 about with them in their feeble brains that transforming 
 virtue have no need of alcohol, nor opium, nor any kind 
 of exciting things. If they have no fire they can make 
 a hearth ; if they lack bread, they form a mental image of 
 a feast. 
 
 Don Quixote is an admirable book because it consists 
 17
 
 258 AlpJionse Dmidet. 
 
 of a monograph of one of these inferior imaginations, 
 and another example is Madame Bovary. That is why 
 I call the faculty of evoking images that faculty which 
 delivers. Just as those children are sheltered from sor- 
 row and melancholy whom we see amusing themselves 
 all alone and inventing games without the help of 
 comrades, exactly so the wretched to whom Providence 
 has intrusted the magic wand support their burdens with 
 ease. 
 
 Such " stories " and " legends " as the little as well as 
 the great call for have only one aim : To supply what 
 is lacking to imaginations which are weak, introduce into 
 an often hard and implacable life another life which does 
 not belong to it, where things come at the right moment, 
 watchful fairies combat evil geniuses and pain and suffer- 
 ing roll away, permitting Gladness to be seen smiling 
 upon her pedestal. We have just been judging art from 
 a bird's-eye view with regard to its intrinsic qualities in 
 the Chinese fashion, but not according to its results ; 
 now art has the sublime destiny of creating about and 
 above our souls enough consoling or amusing images to 
 prevent existence from crushing the souls — whether 
 because these images become an enlarged looking-glass 
 reflecting their condition which permits them to look 
 upon themselves in beauty, or because they represent a 
 condition far superior whither illusion will drag them. 
 Pascal has celebrated dreams in a memorable phrase 
 which puts shepherds and kings on the same level. The 
 role that our faculty must play is to create a perpetual 
 dream. The world would soon come to an end if it 
 were not for the imaginatives and the story-tellers. Com- 
 passionate reality takes care to put on her programme 
 from time to time the realization of some beautiful
 
 Appendix, 259 
 
 dream in order that illusion shall not be altogether lost. 
 So it is that we see treasures discovered, a shepherd who 
 wins a princess to wife, and reparation for great injustices. 
 Such short respites from evil and baseness are sufficient 
 to perpetuate hope. In proportion as the religious 
 imagination which offered wretched men pictures all 
 ready and painted has disappeared, it would seem that the 
 other imagination of which I am speaking has augmented. 
 Mankind has more than ever need of those dreams 
 which uncompromising realists would like to suppress. 
 
 I. — The chances of conversation have caused us to 
 follow a singular path ; we certainly might be allowed to 
 return upon our steps to examine the road we have 
 traversed. 
 
 We began by recognizing the importance of Imagina- 
 tion and rather than define it we have mentioned its 
 powers in detail. Then we established the closeness 
 of connection which it entertains with the faculty of 
 feeling, and to such effect that it appeared to us finally 
 as an extended sensibility. Every man carries about in 
 himself a faculty for being an architect which pushes 
 him to complete any active feeling, but he is not satisfied 
 with that, his life has impressed him strongly. He looks 
 for something more and that prolongation of effort con- 
 stitutes the faculty of receiving images. 
 
 After these premisses we then entered into the heart 
 of the subject and we resolved to proceed by examples. 
 We have traversed with long steps the arts and sciences 
 and their method, and on our way have examined all 
 the imaginary trails and have followed them whenever 
 they seemed to us worth while. 
 
 In this way we have arrived through the representa- 
 tives of humanity to the very frontiers of life itself; and
 
 26o Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 it is very easy to see that I have undergone your influ- 
 ence, since, having taken our departure from an abstract 
 point, we have arrived at the place where we are exam- 
 ining absolutely concrete points of view. 
 
 Once or twice we almost deviated into metaphysics, 
 but with a little energy we have kept that method in 
 reserve for the moment when we might wish to endeavor 
 to make a synthesis instead of an analysis. 
 
 My Father. — That word " method " makes me 
 smile, not that I have not the greatest respect for 
 Descartes, but it seems to me that his Discours has now 
 reached to a certain extent the state of dogma. Des- 
 cartes understood the mathematical sciences very well 
 and his entire work is based on them. To-day while 
 biological sciences are ruling the roost, it seems as if 
 method itself had undergone certain modifications. 
 
 It is intentionally that up to the present moment I 
 have kept our conversation within the limits of live 
 things. I know only too well that one rambles whenever 
 one goes aside from humanity. The faculties or passions, 
 considered outside of those who possess or suffer them, 
 appear to me to be false entities : " the straw of words 
 for the clear grain of things " — that is a reproach from 
 a metaphysician, Leibnitz, I think. 
 
 The position of a romance writer therefore in modern 
 times would be at one and the same time historical and 
 philosophical ; historical, because he lives in a certain 
 epoch and saturates himself with the turn of mind of that 
 epoch and its characteristics and leaves a picture of it 
 which moves the reader ; philosophical, because he seizes 
 upon the passions in their activity within the human 
 tissue where they dwell, and endeavors to elevate them 
 from the particular to the general.
 
 Appendix. 261 
 
 I. — Since we have reached the question of persons 
 affected by their passions, do you not think that they in- 
 troduce important modifications into the phenomena of 
 imagination? We see, ourselves, how much our intelli- 
 gence is upset by various episodes in our existence. 
 
 Thus love is a very powerful and very mysterious 
 source of images. Like a poison it transforms the entire 
 look of nature and opens in the soul novel regions. 
 Then it is that one perceives to what dire extent one 
 ignores one's own character. 
 
 There are human beings in whom the imagination has, 
 so to speak, nothing to say, or is reduced to its simplest 
 expression. They are content with such natural phe- 
 nomena as life presents to them, or more exactly accord- 
 ing to that routine which the habit of the senses traces 
 for them. They never leave their exact limits. They 
 consider any one who raises himself a little bit above the 
 ordinary level, seeks to interpret that which moves him 
 and make: more important that which surrounds him, as 
 crazy or diseased. 
 
 Well, when love touches human beings of that sort they 
 change completely, so that their surroundings can hardly 
 recognize them. Owing to the new sentiment strange 
 forces agitate themselves for the first time within their 
 breasts, forces which disquiet and upset them. They 
 attribute virtues to inanimate things. They hear the 
 birds sing. They perceive that stars exist. In short it 
 is the education of Caliban. Nothing more moving than 
 this metamorphosis ; it causes us to imagine some secret 
 education conducted by nature. 
 
 My Father. — There is nothing like love to rouse the 
 sleeping powers of a man. Every violent movement of 
 consciousness has the same result. Undoubtedly Jeal-
 
 262 Alphorise Daudet. 
 
 ousy may be able to make a poet out of a very common- 
 place individual. As we have known since Spinoza, this 
 vice particularly favors the imagination. It excites 
 pictures of exuberant richness in the most burning 
 regions of the soul, forming the worst of tortures, which 
 renew and transform themselves, or else, increasing in 
 depth, become a veritable obsession. 
 
 But apart from jealousy let us look for instance at 
 avarice. That passion wonderfully sharpens the wits of 
 him who carries it about him. It makes him aware of 
 a multitude of small details which he would never have 
 remarked without its presence. When his favorite topic 
 excites him, it causes him to utter sublime phrases, re- 
 markable utterances which we are not surprised to dis- 
 cover in the mouth of a Pere Grandet, and which of a 
 certainty Balzac actually collected from misers whom he 
 knew. 
 
 And there 's the egoist, of whom George Meredith has 
 traced so wonderful a portrait — what stratagems does 
 he not employ and through what persevering rounds 
 does he not gradually bring back the entire world to 
 his own personality ! 
 
 The scrupulous man is less studious and less favored 
 by literature, although he is nevertheless a character that 
 occurs very often ; the scrupulous man may be consid- 
 ered a victim of his own imagination. It is imagination 
 which swells up the slightest acts in his mind, such acts 
 as an ordinary man never considers as of more than 
 secondary importance, and with excellent reason, because 
 otherwise they would clog and destroy his life after the 
 fashion of parasitic plants. Scrupulosity is a very wide- 
 spread malady of the soul. Theologians understand it 
 and have made excellent descriptions of it. But they
 
 Appendix. 263 
 
 have noticed only one of its forms, the reUgious variant, 
 although it takes on the most varied aspects and torments 
 the most dissimilar souls. What characterizes it espe- 
 cially is an anomalous condition of the moral vision 
 caused by imagination which excites and turns it 
 aside. 
 
 And by that step we reach remorse, in which imagina- 
 tion plays a leading part. That person who is able by 
 an effort of his mind to reconstruct a scene from life, 
 hear the sounds and see the colors and gestures of it, 
 and recall the odors, that man would do well to abstain 
 from any wrong act. 
 
 I. — Don't you think that one might make an inter- 
 esting study of remorse showing itself in an undevel- 
 oped character, which has been hitherto rebellious to 
 feelings and even to all sensations apart from hunger, 
 thirst and weariness? Little by little one might see 
 him enlightening himself from the flame of the torches 
 of the Eumenides. His torture would be a revelation 
 to him. 
 
 My Father. — That is a miracle which often occurs. 
 Whether undeveloped or over-refined, the greater num- 
 ber of mankind are delivered through suffering of 
 the forces which are contained within. A telling mo- 
 ment in our study would be the connection of suffering 
 with imagination. The person who groans understands 
 the groaning of others. The man who has a sore readily 
 sympathizes with the sores of another. That is it, pity 
 . . . that is the great intermediary. That penetrates not 
 only hearts, it penetrates brains also and makes the 
 nerves sensitive. Nature opens wide her portals for 
 the person invaded thereby and he believes that the 
 world has been revealed to him all of a sudden, so much
 
 264 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 does he become aware of the lamentations round about 
 him, so much does he interest himself in a new and pro- 
 found way in trees, animals and his own fellow-beings. 
 Artists who are especially marked by pity have in that 
 respect a very particular mark which distinguishes them 
 profoundly from others. 
 
 Pity it is which excites inspiration in Dickens and 
 Dostoiewski. It is by the way of pity that they glide 
 into the souls of children, debauchees, martyrs and 
 criminals with a truth that amazes us. For if Dante 
 appeared to his contemporaries like a revenant from the 
 infernal regions, from what accursed countries did not 
 that Englishman and that Russian return, bearing such 
 pallor on their faces and showing such a trembling in 
 their hands? 
 
 It is pity which conducted them down into the sombre 
 trench where human suffering moans. It was that which 
 raised the trap-door. They leant over the abyss without 
 disgust and they have brought back to their fellows new 
 cries of anguish and new subjects for indignation. 
 
 For after the pity which widens the imagination 
 comes that anger which fixes its features and gives it 
 the necessary warmth. The two feelings are connected. 
 
 I. — In your last remarks there is the germ of a 
 theory which I believe is true with respect to the origin 
 of satire. 
 
 Satirical writers are reversed lyrical minds. Gifted 
 with nerves of prodigious sensitiveness and a marvellous 
 imagination, they have been placed by their hves in 
 such conditions that their pride was broken, their pity 
 exasperated, and their anger perpetually roused by the 
 spectacle of oppression and pain so far as men apply 
 oppression and pain to their fellows. A new sense is
 
 Appendix. 265 
 
 then born in them which renders existence a pain, 
 and leaves them no repose, the sense of injustice. In 
 Aristophanes, Swift, Fielding, Rabelais, Cervantes and 
 Voltaire, in fact in all the great men filled with indigna- 
 tion, it is possible to perceive the lyrical power, but 
 drawn aside and transformed by a feeling of universal 
 iniquity. 
 
 Whilst on the one side human beings, steeped in 
 lethargy by their laziness, their cowardice or simply 
 habit, su]:)port the spectacle of oppression without com- 
 plaining, these liberators of the human spirit, who are 
 enemies of all power and control, I almost said of every 
 law, insist upon seeing nothing in mankind except an 
 animal which is in pain and which when it is in pain 
 is no longer -responsible for its movements of reaction 
 against suffering. 
 
 Still, in their hands literature rises out of the rule of 
 the mandarin and issues from the ivory tower. It 
 assumes a social importance and thus we see that the 
 part played by imagination may be not only that of the 
 liberator but the avenger. 
 
 Mv Father. — The sad doctrine of the fatalists states 
 that one can do nothing to nothing. Despite all efforts 
 the sum of injustice will ever remain the same upon 
 earth and the cries of the satirists shall be in vain. 
 
 Of a certainty the spectacle that history presents fills 
 us with deep melancholy. For men like Michelet or 
 Carlyle it furnished the stimulus to their imaginations ; 
 bent over that spectacle as over a deep abyss, they heard 
 the distant enormous tumult of battle and perceived shapes 
 flying in rout, combats and metamorphoses. The vanity 
 of all laws which cannot maintain men within the limits 
 of the good and right struck them, laws which are often
 
 266 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 the daughters of tyranny, laws which one day brings 
 forth and the next destroys, laws which ever present 
 themselves with a harsh, immovable and savage face. 
 
 In the minds of those great poets of fact pity and 
 anger must have been carried to the point of paroxysm 
 by the spectacle of horrors for which they could not 
 furnish any remedy whatsoever. History is like the 
 bottom of the sea with its races between voracious 
 foes, its ambuscades, its perpetual struggle for life, its 
 implacability. 
 
 But there is another painful aspect of history which is 
 very well calculated to strike violent imaginations and 
 that is its automatism. I had all of a sudden, whilst 
 listening one day in the garden to the singing of a bird, 
 a vision of nature regulated in its manifestation, nature 
 without the unexpected, without joy and without mys- 
 tery, somewhat like a series of scenery in an opera suc- 
 ceeding the one the other according to hours and 
 seasons, through which a certain number of changeless 
 characters ever marched clothed in their usual cos- 
 tumes and placed in their conventional poses. What a 
 horrible nightmare ! Liberty issuing from the world and 
 leaving behind only the automaton . . . never before 
 did fatalism seem to me so living and terrible ! 
 
 Well, the spectacle of history is somewhat differently 
 powerful than the song of a bird, that it should make 
 us believe in certain periods, certain laws, a necessary 
 rhythm, a long-foreseen succession of murders, wars and 
 empires. That murmur which rises from history has 
 likewise its. predetermined phases, its movements of 
 piano-forte. From a great distance communities appear 
 like those ant-heaps, the destiny of which some English 
 scientist, I know not which, profoundly changed by
 
 Appendix. 267 
 
 pouring upon certain kinds of ants a spoonful of another 
 kind of ants — so much does such an act furnish an 
 abbreviated picture of the making of races and reahns. 
 
 Beauty of imagination consisting as it does more espe- 
 cially of belief in that liberty which it gives us, I can 
 foresee a true torture for the historian if he should reach 
 the point of view of modern fatality and determinism. 
 
 I. — I hold to that phrase you have just pronounced 
 which delights me : " Beauty of imagination consisting 
 more especially of belief in that liberty which it gives 
 us." 
 
 Whether you admit it or not, that is pure metaphysics, 
 and it is certainly strange that we can never approach 
 any question great or little without the Science of 
 Sciences making its appearance at a given moment and 
 forcing the mind to dig deeper yet, down into its own 
 substance. 
 
 This torture of determinism, which is very apparent in 
 history and the historians, is in sober fact the scourge of 
 the imagination ; it seems to impose limits upon the 
 imagination, it makes the imagination believe that it is 
 itself a prisoner to formulas and embarrassed by laws and 
 that it is impossible to free itself from that despotic rule 
 to which all things, all beings and thoughts, must 
 submit. 
 
 It is a scourge of the imagination and a greater one 
 than we suppose, because it limits it forever ; not only 
 does it tear its heart but it restricts it besides. Un- 
 questionably the melancholy of wise old men sprang 
 from no other reasons and the belief in fatality which 
 came to them through the exact sciences will soon appear 
 among the races of the West in as frightful a form as 
 opium.
 
 268 Alphoiise Daudet. 
 
 Like opium determinism has had its phase of elevation, 
 followed very soon by a phase of depression which carries 
 a man toward melancholy, dark thoughts and suicide. 
 And the son of positivism was modern pessimism. Dur- 
 ing the flourishing age of that sombre doctrine great was 
 the boldness of the scientists. They pretended to con- 
 trol and lead everything, even as far as the most secret 
 operation, the most mysterious movements of the human 
 brain. It coincided exactly with certain researches made 
 in that same brain, certain hurried and hazardous physi- 
 ological incursions, which were afterwards called locali- 
 zations. And from the Physiology which the doctors 
 thought they had mastered, there sprang, with what 
 pride and boasting ! a new philosophy, a psycho-physi- 
 ology ! Every week appeared some volume with red 
 edges, in which some faculty of the soul was analyzed 
 according to the most recent methods, methods, it may be 
 said, which recalled the efforts of Bouvard and the illus- 
 trious P^cuchet in their finest periods of scientific zeal. 
 
 Strange discussions arose in which ideas were dis- 
 sected and feelings were weighed with a laughable zeal ! 
 Through what strange aberration of mind did men come 
 to indulge in such childishness who were no more foolish 
 than others and quite as capable of becoming professors 
 and assistants, just as well as their comrades? The 
 moment arrived when they were just about to draw 
 up a chart ne varietur of the human passions, with all 
 the districts neatly bounded and with a table of excep- 
 tions fully drawn up. At that period the "schema" 
 flourished, that schema which has been termed the last 
 concrete vestige of an opinion which has become abstract : 
 it soon became a source of errors. They drew on the 
 board the schema of pride or of avarice side by side
 
 Appendix. 269 
 
 with the schema of the reflex actions in the same. They 
 calculated the variations of sweat and other secretions in 
 a lover, an angry man, an indifferent person, during 
 their crises, apart from crises, during periods of calm, 
 etc. Every assistant professor very soon thought him- 
 self an admirable philosopher because philosophy had 
 shrunk to a narrow chapter of medicine. As to meta- 
 physics, that was railed upon, scorned, gibed at, and 
 relegated among old superstitions. It was considered 
 the attribute of degenerates or fools, for it may be noted 
 that this was also the blooming period for the mind 
 doctors. 
 
 Filled with zeal, vigor and authority, these mind 
 doctors saw no obstacle before them. Desirous to 
 furnish on a new system their houses thus built, they 
 claimed as their clients not only men of talent but also 
 the men of genius, and in preference artists, whoever had 
 been distinguished through his pen or his pencil. The 
 slightest suggestion of art became suspicious. This con- 
 versation upon Imagination would have left no doubt 
 whatever as to our condition of mind. And on their 
 side the mind doctors started a rivalry with the psycho- 
 physiologists, for they themselves were likewise seriously 
 occupied in weighing, localizing and analyzing the human 
 faculties, and really nothing was prettier than those little 
 red, blue and green houses which they attributed to 
 them on the surface of the brain. 
 
 Suddenly things changed ; a new generation of meta- 
 phj'sicians, ardent and vigorous, rose from the earth at 
 the very moment that it was thought that metaphysics 
 were buried. Then was there in the camp of the Dia- 
 foiruses and the Purgons of philosophy a rout indeed ! 
 They made a sieve of their follies. People began to
 
 270 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 look askance at the mind doctors. Serious works ap- 
 peared in which things returned to their former state 
 because so many pretended discoveries were reduced to 
 their real proportions. It was seen that many of the 
 localizations were false and that some of them were even 
 absurd. 
 
 To-day treatises on Psycho-physiology are mouldering 
 in a deep shade. To their great regret the mind doctors 
 have been forced to renounce their pretensions concern- 
 ing art and artists. We sent them back to their douches 
 and dark cells with no little rudeness. And finally as a 
 culmination of mortification, a metaphysic of liberty was 
 installed anew by sharp and perspicuous souls which is 
 thoroughly in the swim of modern ideas. 
 
 And since in the moral world everything hangs to- 
 gether, it may be remarked that the theories of determi- 
 nism, like everything else which gives itself up to fatality, 
 flourished during the epoch of oppression, during defeat 
 and distress, whilst on the other hand the theories of 
 liberty belong to the vigorous and well-constituted 
 generation. For there again it is — fatalism deprives 
 people entirely of energy like opium. Is it not singular 
 that modern Germany should have sprung from Hegel- 
 ianism and the doctrines of Fichte and Schelling? The 
 man who believes himself the master of his own acts is 
 a thousand times stronger than he who believes that his 
 acts have been ordained. What is the use of attempting 
 to move if movement has pre-established causes, if free 
 will has nothing to do with it? 
 
 My Father. — This moral point of view is important, 
 and it is certain that ideas have an active virtue in them 
 even if they appear abstract and detached from all 
 human connection. The moral world exists in the in-
 
 Appendix, 2 7 1 
 
 terior of the social world like water in an aq\iarium, 
 water in a constant state of movement. This world is 
 impressionable to everything which comes from without. 
 A doctrine upsets it which we thought had no danger in 
 it. A bad law works in the same way. Men are so 
 interknit that everything holds together in whatever 
 springs from them. 
 
 For my part I have never been a partisan of narrow 
 fatalism ; the moment that my conscientiousness seems 
 to me free, I have admitted that it was free, and as to 
 incursions into the domain of art and philosophy, I 
 think they are as misplaced as they are foolish. 
 
 I have even been astounded to see to what a degree 
 science leaves me cold. I admire science in its living 
 manifestations, when it solaces or heals, but it seems to 
 me feeble and vacillating in its theoretical part and all 
 the more pretentious because it is peculiarly subject to 
 error. 
 
 So far as feelings and their variations are concerned I 
 think that I have brought to this study absolute upright- 
 ness and zeal. After forty years of a constant, and I 
 might almost say, sickly observation — so greatly has my 
 fellow-man always tormented me — I have reached this 
 certainty that I know very few things and possess a 
 very small circle of clear ideas. Those who pretend to 
 explore that delicate realm with measuring instruments, 
 " schemas " or theories, are poor, wretched, lost ones. 
 They, more than any other people, deserve the reproach 
 of craziness. One must be mad to suppose that one 
 could concentrate into a single little book the last word 
 that is to be said upon any question whatever which re- 
 lates to the intelligence or the will. 
 
 So far as scientists are concerned they have interested
 
 272 Alp house Daicdet. 
 
 me, after my whim, to a greater or less degree, accord- 
 ing as their science was more or less human, directing 
 itself toward our great virtues or our feeble sides. 
 
 I have known admirable physicians who were not 
 geniuses, so far as theories are concerned, and who were 
 nevertheless healers. They went straight for the evil 
 and fought it. In diagnosis should not a faculty for 
 mental images occupy a preponderating part? A good 
 clinical physician ought to represent to himself the 
 complete chart of the human body with its ierrae 
 incogniiae, its lions and its tigers, like those on old 
 geographical maps, which were placed there to show 
 our ignorance. He should also represent sickness, its 
 causes, march and progress, then through heredity — 
 that heredity which he has so deplorably abused — his 
 imagination continues and prolongs itself beyond the 
 individual as far out as to the species and race. 
 
 I. — So far as discovery and its mechanism is con- 
 cerned, I think it is Claude Bernard who has shown that 
 it proceeds more especially through analogy. 
 
 The phenomena of the universe form one vast tapes- 
 try in which everything hangs together and knot is 
 interknit with knot. Ordinary eyes are perfectly con- 
 tent with the figures shown upon it and do not search 
 farther into their co-relations the one with the other. 
 
 Observers, however, are anxious as to the contour of 
 these figures, their resemblances and differences. It is 
 perfectly clear to them that the tapestry has some mean- 
 ing and that, beside its immediate significance, it pos- 
 sesses another less obvious one. They notice moreover 
 that there are crossings and defects and missing stitches, 
 that there are pieces overlaid and marks of pauses in 
 the work and returns thereto.
 
 Appendix. 273 
 
 But those who use their imagination are interested in 
 the relations and analogies between parts of the tapestry 
 which are far distant from each other — analogies of 
 form and color and direction which seem to them to 
 correspond to mysterious and profound relationships. 
 A group of a number of such dependent relations con- 
 stitutes the "discovery." 
 
 Thus the discovery seems to us, generally speaking, a 
 relationship between distant phenomena. It connects 
 regions that are far apart ; between the primordial 
 figures others rise into sight, suggested by the union of 
 corresponding points. 
 
 From this it results that the imagination of scientists 
 invents nothing. But it associates and clears up ideas. 
 That is especially visible in the mathematical sciences, 
 whose adepts suck from them such an amount of satis- 
 faction and vanity that they scorn all the rest of human 
 knowledge. And in truth, since their minds move along 
 a series of combinations which the mind itself has 
 created, they are in a state of perpetual joy because the 
 sections of their reasoning adapt themselves exactly to 
 the results of such reasoning. Their imagination only 
 sums up a set of facts, but this gives them the illusion of 
 enlarging its sphere, and they are not troubled with those 
 discordances and discrepancies, those mere approxima- 
 tions to reality, which science has used for its own pur- 
 poses during recent epochs. 
 
 Mv Father. — Yet we have to grant their own gran- 
 deur to scientific imaginations. Men like Darwin and 
 Claude Bernard fill an ignoramus like myself with ad- 
 miration, because I feel in their words the fever of truth 
 and a marvellous scrupulosity which enchants me. They 
 are not ashamed to iicknowledge their own mistakes. 
 
 18
 
 274 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 They will not hesitate to upset their system itself if that 
 system does not correspond with facts. 
 
 The life of that great man Darwin is notably a con- 
 stant example of sincerity and kindliness ; I know few 
 works as precious from our point of view as the account 
 of the voyage of the " Beagle," that voyage which he made 
 when young and when the greater part of his ideas were 
 forming themselves in his powerful brain. 
 
 Here we are present at their birth. His imagination 
 is aroused by a constant, assiduous and exhaustive obser- 
 vation. His eyes are not covered by the bandages of 
 routine and convention. He has divested himself of 
 that fog through which habit causes us to see everything. 
 He has preserved untouched \\\q faculty of astonishment, 
 that wondrous gift of infancy which educates us in a 
 short while, causing us to acquire more in a few years 
 than in all the rest of our Hfe. Moreover his uprightness 
 is absolute ; he freed himself from the common tend- 
 ency which consists in our persistence in an error when- 
 ever that error is convenient to us and has become a 
 habit. " People do not make their ideas over again 
 when sixty years old " — a mournful statement which I 
 have often heard repeated and which fills me every 
 time with indignation. We change our ideas at every 
 age ! Are we not only too lucky to free ourselves from 
 a mistake ? And if we have shouldered that mistake for 
 a great many years, all the more should we find it neces- 
 sary to hate it ! 
 
 Darwin fears misty generalizations and only advances 
 step by step. Nevertheless there never was a man 
 more capable of vast theories and of using those enor- 
 mous nets with which one can sweep up facts in masses 
 and therewith astonish the ignorant. There is no doubt 
 
 A
 
 Appendix. 275 
 
 that he would have suffered much, if he had been pres- 
 ent to see the strange distortions of his doctrine and 
 their crude appUcation to the social, moral and political 
 world. 
 
 Our minds are so at the mercy of error ! If error 
 has not corrupted the originator it assails his imitators 
 and his disciples. It is the fungus that grows a parasite 
 upon every fine act of the imagination. The subtler, 
 more ductile and stronger an idea is, the more people 
 draw absurd or premature conclusions from it, so that 
 sometimes a truth succumbs under the weight of the 
 follies which it drags along in its wake, follies for which 
 it was never responsible. 
 
 We have seen Darwin's doctrines put to use as a 
 political catch-word. Anticlericalism has used them, 
 but it has been fatal. People have made the poor great 
 genius say a great many things which had never been 
 thought of by one who was scrupulous to excess, by the 
 man who waked up his friends at two o'clock in the 
 morning after a long conversation on the " Sentiment of 
 the Sublime " in order to warn them that he had made a 
 mistake in some anecdote. 
 
 I. — Science has before everything else the craving for 
 proofs. It has need of long patience and lays on the 
 most brilliant imaginations a bridle which must often 
 become painful. 
 
 Moreover the scientist when he does make a discovery 
 has the sorrow of having to say that he only makes a 
 statement in corroboration. The artist, however, enjoys 
 the illusion of creating. As a matter of fact this creation 
 itself is for the greater part a mirage, since art consists of 
 a happy choice and an assembling together of beauties 
 that have already existed. The man of letters does not
 
 276 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 invent a new sentiment or an unpublished character any 
 more than the playwright does. The very rhythm and 
 cadence which he gives to his work, his style itself, 
 proceeds from some one ; let him be as personal as he 
 chooses, he must admit an origin and birth for it some- 
 where. Neither painter nor sculptor represents anything 
 v/hich did not exist before in the world. It is somewhat 
 different in regard to music. But looking at things a 
 little closer, music is the lofty manifestation of a har- 
 mony, the models for which exist in nature. Neverthe- 
 less the writer, the painter, the sculptor and the musician, 
 whenever their work bears them along, believe honestly 
 that they are adding to the world something which did 
 not exist before their time. 
 
 Sublime illusion, and one that makes a man invinci- 
 ble ! It is very painful to acknowledge to oneself that 
 one lies in a prison where one can but count the prison 
 bars. It is painful to remember that the human mind 
 has its laws of limitation and that imagination cannot 
 pass beyond a certain point, and that it is impossible to 
 break away from gravitation, whether cosmical, social, or 
 moral. 
 
 If one looks at the matter from that point of view, 
 could one not believe that the imagination is a constant 
 counsellor of liberty? The doctrine of Finalities has 
 served its time. We do not admit that a given faculty 
 has to be granted to man for a definite and restricted 
 purpose. But it is certain that the moral universe, 
 exactly like the material world, has a tendency to pre- 
 serve and continue its equilibrium and harmony. But 
 to preserve this, sometimes marvellous sacrifices are 
 necessary. 
 
 What would the world become for us if we could not
 
 Appejidix. 277 
 
 continue and modify it through images? It is through 
 the latter even more than through the association of 
 ideas that our power of feeling is perpetually awake and 
 in action. 
 
 Uo we not know a class of minds in whom the imagi- 
 nation is nothing but the introduction to the divine ? 
 After a period of darkness, behold us interesting our- 
 selves again in the mystical writers ! The grand breatli 
 that blows through them has once more a meaning in 
 our epoch and the gropings that go on about symbols 
 show the disquiet of human thought which wishes to free 
 itself from its bonds. 
 
 When conscience is laid captive it escapes through 
 the imagination. What does the prisoner do? He 
 dreams of the time when he is free, out in the fields, 
 beneath the sky, among the flowers. He thinks of 
 everything which moves and agitates itself outside the 
 walls of his prison. Man is a perpetual prisoner. Such is 
 the law of his desire that he wearies of that which he has 
 obtained, and those who are most completely satisfied 
 are at the same time the most miserable, unless indeed 
 they can escape through the imagination. When you 
 applaud reality, you speak of a certain kind of reality 
 that is neither flat nor low nor vulgar, because your im- 
 agination enlarges it. If we examine the world which 
 surrounds us, marking its forms and outlines and the 
 signs that represent its figures, then it suddenly widens 
 out. Whether our tendencies are abstract and inclined 
 to be satisfied by formulas, or concrete and in love with 
 actual examples, the effort of respiration is the same 
 in all of us and we ever march onward toward the 
 heights. 
 
 My Father. — I think I have known suffering but I
 
 278 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 have never understood ennui. It is the imagination to 
 which I owe that ; sincerely do I mourn for those who are 
 lacking of it. I am ready to go farther — whoever does 
 not imagine is incapable of observing. For observation 
 always surpasses reality, lending it the sounds and colors 
 of the senses belonging to the observer. 
 
 I once returned from a journey with a friend and we 
 were recounting our impressions. When ray turn came 
 he did not interrupt me, but I saw from his astonishment 
 that he accused me in his heart of imposture. Yet both 
 of us were absolutely honest. Only, he had not re- 
 marked at all the things which struck me the most and 
 he believed that I was inventing. A similar error is 
 common. We are always ready to believe that he lies 
 who has seen more than we have. In the eyes of 
 many people poets and visionaries are either children or 
 half idiots. The number of eyes which do not see and 
 of ears which do not hear and of fingers which have 
 never touched and felt is simply immeasurable. 
 
 Ever since we have been talking of the imagination we 
 have failed to discuss its morbid frontiers, its deviations 
 and shames. Is that an error? It is my belief that 
 monsters do little in the way of instruction. They are 
 objects of fright, far more than subjects of study, and the 
 disgust which Goethe felt for them had the deepest of 
 reasons. 
 
 One of the advantages of this admirable faculty is that 
 little that is exciting is necessary for its existence; a 
 glint, gesture or word are sufficient. A man with imagi- 
 nation does with one look that which Cuvier did with 
 one bone, he reconstructs an entire individual. 
 
 I. — Indeed it is extremely curious to see how too 
 many details and over-richness of nourishment harm the
 
 Appendix. 279 
 
 faculty for images. And is not that an indication as to its 
 mechanism with which we have not yet occupied ourselves? 
 
 Like the greater number of phenomena within and 
 without us the imagination proceeds by whirhvimh. 
 Those who possess this faculty to the point of paroxysm 
 find that the slightest cause of exterior action falling 
 upon the brain through the senses arouses at once an 
 excitation of all those impressions of the senses which 
 memory had treasured up heretofore. It has always 
 seemed to me that a window pane affected by frost, upon 
 which beautiful wintry pictures have suddenly formed 
 themselves, presents a picture of what passes at such 
 times in our mind. There, within the mystery of the 
 nervous cells, a quantity of unknown laws set to work — 
 attractions, repulsions and combinations of various kinds 
 which are without doubt just as complicated as those 
 that rule the movement of the stars. 
 
 But it is easy to distinguish a rapid imagination 
 and a slow imagination. The former is in perpetual 
 observation ; the second is a mechanism apart. All ot 
 a sudden, thoughts and embryonic thoughts, sensations 
 and memories which have remained benumbed within 
 the crypts of our substance are aroused by new impres- 
 sions. Then slow and tenacious figures form themselves 
 in the spirit, so tenacious that they become in some 
 human \i€\Xig% fixed ideas. Is it not in these phenomena 
 of slow imagination that we should look for the key to 
 craziness, concerning which we still possess only very 
 vague indications? 
 
 But quite apart from craziness, the artistic life and 
 more especially the life of the man of letters give us 
 daily examples of the rapid and slow imagination, for 
 the two are associated in the work of composition.
 
 28o Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 My Father. — What a singular study it would be it 
 one were to work at the state of the mind whilst imagin- 
 ation is in action ! 
 
 It is impossible for me to work when noise goes on. 
 At that moment my brain is in such a state of super- 
 excitement that the slightest sound and the smallest 
 change in light upsets my thought and carries me away 
 from my point. That mechanism of which you speak 
 seizes everything which comes to it through the senses. 
 
 There are others on the contrary who are able to ab- 
 stract themselves completely in the midst of tumult, of the 
 coming and going of people and of children. It seems 
 as if a deadened wall had been lowered between their 
 imagination and external life. 
 
 The choice of a word is an exhaustive operation 
 whenever we wish to seize and hold a sensation as 
 closely as possible. We make an exact image of it to 
 ourselves and that alone is a fatigue. Then we compare 
 to it the various words, adjectives or nouns which mem- 
 ory brings to us and we try them by the eye and the 
 ear just as a jeweller tries his precious stones. A close 
 adaptation of a word gives a particular kind of joy which 
 all writers know and the reader will find for himself. 
 This is the most wearisome of work. 
 
 For the imagination is a machine which requires 
 special care. The livelier and more easily excitable it is, 
 the more delicate its springs may be, the more dangerous 
 is it to strain it too much. Woe to those who hope to 
 inflame it through poisons ! The progress of the latter 
 is fatal — a fraudulent excitement which makes us think 
 the least effort sublime, and then a depression which 
 makes us incapable of realizing the effort. One of the 
 laws of images consists in this, that normal life alone
 
 Appendix. 28 1 
 
 must bring it to the spirit. And that is done without 
 our volition. That is not subject to rules. 
 
 The hygiene of the imagination is simple. When it 
 is fatigued it demands repose from its own action and 
 its repose consists in diversion. The moral occupations 
 of life rest and quiet it. How many illustrious writers 
 have there not been, who have paid with their life or 
 their reason for some abuse of that faculty which is our 
 tool, and from which one should not ask too much ! 
 
 I have talked about diversion. That is likewise the 
 greatest remedy for the too great persistence of images. 
 Now that shows us, those are not the most singular scenes 
 of nature, nor the most remarkable episodes of life 
 which seize upon and fill the memory most. Often 
 some word or gesture, some insignificant act remains in 
 our mind to torture it. Is not this a proof that without 
 our own volition our sensibility undergoes plenty of 
 alternatives which ofier a chance or destiny to our 
 images? That which finds us in a state of receptivity 
 enters and penetrates us deeply. That which finds us 
 in a state of closedness or of half-closure, carves itself 
 in but shallowly and is quickly effaced. 
 
 l£on a. daudet.
 
 THE DAUDET FAMILY. 
 
 MY BROTHER AND I. 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF INFANCY AND YOUTH. 
 
 By ERNEST DAUDET.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 To THE Reader : 
 
 Alphonse Daudet, to whom these recollections 
 are consecrated, is to-day (1881) at the height of 
 his renown. His works are fought for by pub- 
 lishers and newspapers and are translated into all 
 languages; they are popular in London as well 
 as in Paris, at Vienna as at Berlin, in New York as 
 in St. Petersburg. If there were any need of justi- 
 fication for these intimate and personal notes which 
 you are about to read, I would not care to invoke 
 any other excuse than this very legitimate popu- 
 larity which is so perfectly adequate to explain 
 their appearance. 
 
 As to the special attraction which they may 
 offer to readers because of the relationship which 
 connects the one who writes them with him who is 
 the object of their appearance, I have but a word 
 to say. Ever since Alphonse Daudet was born, 
 life has hardly separated us to any extent. I am 
 perfectly convinced that no one is in a position 
 to speak of the man and the writer with greater 
 exactness than I, unless indeed it were his own 
 self; and I have besides the advantage of being 
 able to state what certainly he would never dare 
 to mention of himself.
 
 286 Preface. 
 
 For a long time now my mind has been besieged 
 with the temptation to give this account and to 
 render precise and fix various recollections from 
 which Alphonse himself has often drawn inspira- 
 tion for his novels and studies. I have said to 
 myself that at a time when the novel tends to 
 draw its nourishment more and more from actual 
 facts; at a time when the need for sincerity is 
 imposed imperiously upon whomsoever holds a 
 pen, such true notes as these concerning an 
 already distant past would have hardly less chance 
 to please the public than some work of fiction 
 which only owes its success to the effort its author 
 has made to reproduce mankind and life exactly. 
 
 It is under a form of this kind that the mental 
 siege of which I speak has for a long time involved 
 my mind. Perhaps I would have overcome it and 
 would never have got the better of my scruples, 
 had it not been for the endeavors of certain friends 
 who have undertaken to demonstrate to me that I 
 owed these documentary proofs concerning my 
 brother to the history of our literature of to-day, and 
 that I was bound to write my account, even though 
 I should postpone its publication indefinitely. 
 
 So then, I began the work as if it were some- 
 thing which was destined never to leave the circle 
 of our intimate friends. But destiny had decided 
 otherwise in the matter ; hardly was it done, when 
 an affectionate piece of violence gave it to the 
 public under the title Alphonse Daudet by Ernest 
 Dandet. 
 
 Perhaps I may be permitted to say that its
 
 Preface. 287 
 
 success was very great among the readers of the 
 NoHvelle Revue. On the other hand, my brother, 
 whom I had not been able to consult, because at 
 that time we were far apart one from another, he 
 being in Switzerland and I in Normandy, was 
 somewhat moved by perceiving that he was being 
 treated " as people only treat the dead." He 
 wrote me : " I am alive, and very much alive, and 
 you are much too quick to make me take my 
 place in history. I know some people who will 
 say that I have caused a piece of self-advertisement 
 to be made by my brother." 
 
 Whether well-grounded or not, the objection 
 came rather late. The book was launched and 
 there was nothing for it but to let it sail. So that 
 is what I have done, in perfect agreement with 
 Alphonse Daudet, after having at his own desire 
 suppressed many warm eulogies of his talent, 
 which, from my fraternal pen, carried with them 
 no authority, and after having changed the original 
 title which he thought too loud. He advised me 
 to use that which is seen on the cover of this 
 volume (^Mon Frhe et Mot ; Souvenirs d' Enfance 
 et de Jeunesse) and although I have always pro- 
 fessed the most profound disgust for the " moi," 
 still, I had so many excuses to make for my 
 audacious undertaking that I felt constrained to 
 accede to his wish without discussion. 
 
 That, in brief, is the story of my book. I owe 
 the explanation to the public, to whose good will 
 I confide it. I will only add one word — I must 
 be forgiven if I place myself on the stage side by
 
 288 Preface, 
 
 side with my brother. Our lives were so closely 
 united that I would not be able to speak of him 
 without also speaking of myself. I have tried to 
 do it with discretion, because these pages are 
 before everything else inspired by the greatest 
 brotherly tenderness and by no less lively an 
 admiration. 
 
 E. D.
 
 MY BROTHER AND I. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 The name Daudet is pretty widely spread in 
 Languedoc. Some of the families which bear it 
 have suppressed the last letter ; such are Daud6 
 d'Alzon, Daude de Lavalette, Daude de Labarthe. 
 It is often found in the Lozere district at Mende 
 and at Marvejols under both forms of writing. 
 In the seventeenth century it was brought before 
 the public by an engraver, an art critic, an engi- 
 neer and two Protestant theologians ; a certain 
 Chevalier Daudet wrote and caused to be printed 
 an account of a trip made by Louis XV to 
 Strasburg. 
 
 Have these Daud6s or Daudets, who were all 
 originally from the C6vennes, a common origin? 
 It is to be supposed they have. What is more 
 assured, however, is that the branch from which 
 we, Alphonse and I, issued, flourished in a little 
 village called Concoules a few leagues from Ville- 
 fort in the Lozere district at the spot where that 
 department joins with the Ardeche and the Gard. 
 
 At the beginning of the Revolution our grand- 
 father, who was a peasant with a mind that was 
 rather broad than cultivated, had come down from 
 
 19
 
 290 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 those wild mountains with his brother to estabHsh 
 himself at Nimes, in order to work at the trade 
 of " tafifetassier " or silk weaver. He was called 
 Jacques and his brother Claude. A royalist of 
 the most violent kind, Claude was massacred in 
 1790 during the bloody days of the " bagarre ; " 
 and Jacques himself very nearly met his death in 
 conditions hardly less tragical. 
 
 It was in the midst of the Days of Terror. The 
 gallows remained permanently standing on the 
 terrace at Nimes. In a single day thirty inhab- 
 itants of Beaucaire were made to mount the 
 scaffold, charged with being accomplices of the 
 royalist conspirators in the Vivarais ; they were 
 artisans for the most part, since it was a curious 
 fact that in the South the Jacobins seemed to 
 recruit their victims by preference from the folk. 
 These wretched people went to their death inton- 
 ing the Miserere. Having only recently come 
 down from his hill country, Jacques Daudet hap- 
 pened to be on their path and his soul opened out 
 with pity whilst his eyes filled with tears, — 
 
 " Ah ! li paoiiri gent ! " (" Oh ! the poor crea- 
 tures ! ") cried he. 
 
 At once he was surrounded by the men belong- 
 ing to the. escort of the victims, who maltreated 
 and hustled him into the melancholy procession 
 whilst threatening to execute him without process 
 of law. Luckily one of them who was less ex- 
 cited than the others urged him to fly and pro- 
 tected his escape. Our good C^venol peasant 
 hastened to disappear and profited by the lesson ;
 
 My Brother and I. 291 
 
 because thereafter he was never heard uttering his 
 sentiments aloud in the streets. 
 
 The flight of time took those melancholy years 
 away with it. Under the Consulate, Jacques 
 Daudet is found at the head of an important 
 weaving-works, which the large merchants of the 
 city rarely allowed to stand still. At that period 
 the industry of silk-weaving was flourishing in 
 Nimes. It supplied the stuff for the demand 
 for cravats, skirts, scarfs and other fine lace-like 
 fabrics which in their perfection were quite equal 
 to the finest products of the factories of Lyon. 
 It nourished, throughout the city and the villages 
 round about, a hundred different trades, and it 
 occupied a shining position side by side with * 
 that tremendous output of carpets, shawls and 
 scarfs, which carried the name of the commerce 
 of Nimes as far as the Orient. 
 
 Very soon Jacques Daudet became weary of 
 being nothing but a workman. He established a 
 sales-house and was not long in putting together 
 a little fortune. In the mean time he had mar- 
 ried, and two sons and three daughters were born 
 of this union. It was his fourth child Vincent 
 who was the father of Alphonse Daudet and 
 myself 
 
 At twenty years a handsome man was that same 
 Vincent, with his Bourbon head, black hair, rosy 
 complexion and eyes well forward in his face, 
 pinched into his tightly-fitting frock-coat and 
 wearing a white cravat like a magistrate — a cus- 
 tom which he kept up throughout his life ! His
 
 292 Alphonse Datidet. 
 
 education had not passed the first smatterings in 
 Latin, because his father had " harnessed him to 
 business " as early as the age of sixteen. But he 
 had moved ^bout the world, namely, Normandy, 
 la Vendue and Brittany, which was the world at 
 that time, driving with his own hands a wagon 
 crammed full of the output of his father's looms, 
 which he sold in the towns to the larger mer- 
 chants of those distant lands. He travelled night 
 and day, winter and summer, with two pistols in a 
 little green bag to defend himself against high- 
 waymen. 
 
 The commercial customs suited to an epoch 
 which knew nothing of the telegraph or of rail- 
 ways are entirely transformed to-day. But they 
 had the merit of forming a man quickly when in 
 contact with the difficulties, adventures and re- 
 sponsibilities which they engendered. So, then, at 
 twenty years of age Vincent Daudet was a fellow 
 all fire and flames, but prudent and cautious — 
 very Catholic and Royalist, it is hardly necessary 
 to say ! — and in every respect worthy of the 
 excellent people who had brought him into the 
 world ; besides, he was extremely fascinating, 
 which does no harm !
 
 My Brother and /. 293 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 At that time, about 1829, the house of Daudet 
 was in constant business relations with the house of 
 Reynaud, from which it bought the hanks of silk 
 thread needed for the fabrication of silks. That 
 was a famous stock, too, was the Reynaud stock — 
 as we shall soon see. Its cradle can still be seen in 
 the mountains of the Ardeche in the shape of an 
 ancient and comfortable house called La Vignasse 
 which is built on a heap of broken crags among 
 chestnut and mulberry groves, overlooking that 
 valley of Jales, where, from 1790 to 1792, the 
 Royalist assemblies took place which were called 
 together by the Abb6 Claude Allier and the Count 
 de Saillans, who were the agents for the exiled 
 princes. 
 
 La Vignasse had been bought the lOth of June, 
 1645, by Jean Reynaud the son of S^bastien Rey- 
 naud of Boisseron. At that time it was a little do- 
 main whither Jean Reynaud went to establish him< 
 self after his marriage ; on it he built the dwelling 
 which still belongs to his descendants. From 1752 
 to 1773 one of his descendants, our great-grand- 
 father, had six sons and three daughters. Of the 
 latter, two married, the third entered the convent
 
 294 Alphoyise Daudet. 
 
 of Notre-Dame de Largentiere, where her grand- 
 aunt on the maternal side, Catherine de Tavernos, 
 was at that time the Lady Superior. As to the six 
 sons, one of whom was our grandfather, for the 
 most part they had adventures which are worth 
 noting here. 
 
 The eldest, Jean, remained in his father's house 
 and produced a stock of excellent people ; his 
 grandson, Arsene Reynaud, resides there still, full 
 of life and health in spite of his great age, honored, 
 highly esteemed and giving to all about him an 
 example of the most masculine virtues. 
 
 The second, William, " the Russian uncle," went 
 to London at the Revolution and established there 
 a fine business in Parisian articles. The French 
 exiles having been expelled from England, he left 
 for Hamburg, whence he pushed forward to Russia 
 and transferred his business to St. Petersburg. By 
 the use of tact he succeeded in having himself 
 named as a furnisher to the Court, and he had 
 quickly put together a fortune reckoned at 300,000 
 francs, which was a very considerable sum for that 
 time. 
 
 Through what causes did he find himself mixed 
 up with the first conspiracy against Paul L ? We 
 have never been able to learn. That conspiracy 
 having failed, our uncle William had to listen to a 
 verdict against himself which confiscated all his 
 property and ordered his banishment to Siberia, 
 Thither was he led on foot and in chains with the 
 greater number of his accomplices. At first he 
 was luckier than the others and succeeded in es-
 
 My Brother and I. 295 
 
 caping by mingling with the following of an am- 
 bassador whom the Russian Government was send- 
 ing to China. Unfortunately he was recognized at 
 the very moment they were crossing the frontier 
 and sent back into Siberia. There he would prob- 
 ably have died but for the success of the second 
 conspiracy against the Czar Paul, who, as will be 
 remembered, was strangled in i8or ; this put an 
 end to his exile. Alexander I. signed his reprieve 
 and returned his fortune to him. 
 
 Our " Russian uncle " returned to France after 
 the Restoration and settled in Paris where he died 
 in 1 8 19, leaving all his property to his house- 
 keeper, a certain Catherine Dropski, who lived 
 close to him for twenty years ; she disappeared 
 suddenly without giving time to the plundered 
 family to make demands on her for the property. 
 
 The third son of Jean Reynaud was called 
 Francois. He it is that we still designate under the 
 name of '*our uncle the Abb6." A fine type of priest 
 and citizen was that Abb6 Reynaud, concerning 
 whom his great-nephews have a right to speak with 
 no little pride. Rarely does a man unite in himself 
 more natural gifts. Those who knew him never 
 pronounce his name without a tone of respectful 
 admiration. 
 
 Wishing to enter the Church, he took his first 
 studies with the Oratorians at Aix, intending to 
 remain with that famous congregation and devote 
 himself to instruction; but soon recalled by his 
 bishop, who wished to keep him among the clergy 
 of his diocese, he continued his studies at the sem-
 
 296 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 inary of Valence, whence he departed In 1789 to 
 occupy a modest curacy in the Vivarais. Having 
 refused to give his adhesion to the civil constitution 
 of the clergy, but wishing to take no part in the 
 plots which were being woven by others round 
 about him, he left in disguise for Paris, intending 
 to live with his brother Baptiste, of whom I shall 
 presently speak. 
 
 Very soon after his arrival in Paris he was 
 present at a meeting of the Convention in which 
 very rigorous measures were voted to prevent 
 suspected men from leaving the capital. Without 
 waiting for the close of that meeting, he walked off 
 and took the stage coach to Rouen. A few days 
 later he was in London, whither he caused his 
 brother William to come over after him. 
 
 During the long stay which he made in England 
 our uncle the Abbe lived apart from the society of 
 the exiles, whose attitude and proceedings he al- 
 ways disavowed. Having exhausted his means 
 and become a teacher, he entered as instructor the 
 family of a scientific man who was educating a 
 small number of young people belonging to the 
 aristocracy of Great Britain. He gave that finish 
 there to his own studies which was lacking to them, 
 and studied especially the English language, with 
 which he soon became so familiar that he was able 
 to teach it in London itself During that stay he 
 was the hero of an adventure concerning which he 
 never spoke except with profound emotion. 
 
 He had thought it his duty to conceal his pro- 
 fession of priest from the people with whom he
 
 My Brother ajid I. 297 
 
 entertained social relations. There was a young, 
 beautiful, distinguished and rich girl in one of the 
 families in which he was received. Touched by 
 his natural grace, his gentle look and particularly 
 by the dignity of his life, she took a liking to the 
 exile. As he did not seem to understand the senti- 
 ments which he had inspired, she begged her father 
 to make her avowal to him, offering to follow him 
 to France whenever he should return thither. 
 Everything that could be presented to flatter the 
 imagination of a young man, vistas of a brilliant 
 future, the delights of a deep love, all were put in 
 motion to persuade Francois, but his conscience 
 dictated other duties to him and without betraying 
 his secret he refused the happiness offered him. In 
 that simple episode is there not a delightful subject 
 for a novel? At last his term of exile was at an 
 end. 
 
 Under the Consulate, Abbe Reynaud was struck 
 from the list of exiles. He returned to France 
 resolved to continue that career of instruction 
 which his exile had opened for him. Called to 
 take charge of the College of Aubenas, he stayed 
 there a while. In 181 1 he was named as principal 
 of the College at Alais. He lived there to the day 
 of his death, that is to say, for twenty-four years 
 more, always a fervent university man, deeply 
 attached to the college, which he had reorganized 
 and rendered flourishing, and, rather than to leave it 
 refusing the highest positions, even the episcopate. 
 One of his biographers has said that he caused to 
 live again the picture of good Abbe Rollin.
 
 298 Alphonse DaudeL 
 
 He was sweetness and urbanity in action. His 
 tolerance was equal to his liberalism, and in a 
 country where religious differences have engen- 
 dered so many evils he practised this maxim : 
 In matters of faith, constraint can never produce 
 anything but bitter fruit. 
 
 During the Ministry of Villele he had to under- 
 take a long campaign against the Jesuits, who 
 wanted to take his college away from him. In 
 order to make him leave his post, they had re- 
 course to the most unworthy manoeuvres ; but his 
 unconquerable energy was equal to their greatest 
 efforts and victory perched upon his banner. An 
 heroic end was fore-ordained for such a life as his. 
 On the 1st of July 1825 an epidemic of cholera 
 sprang up in Alais and became so violent that it 
 was necessary to close the college. At that time 
 Abbe Reynaud was 71 years old. Before they left 
 the college the professors came to him and begged 
 him to leave Alais. 
 
 " It is my duty to stick to my post since I am 
 a priest," answered he, "where there are afflicted 
 people to console and wretched ones to help. If 
 I went away I should dishonor myself; I should 
 cover myself with dishonor no less than an officer 
 might who before the battle should abandon his 
 flag and soldiers." 
 
 The very next day he entered the hospital and 
 settled himself there ; for two months he gave him- 
 self up to nursing with the most admirable devotion. 
 On the loth of September he was suddenly stricken 
 by the disease in his turn and died two days after,
 
 My Brother and I. 299 
 
 victim of a duty which his age might have per- 
 mitted him to evade, instead of fulfilHng it with so 
 courageous an ardor. 
 
 The name of Abbe Reynaud has continued pop- 
 ular at Alais, and if I have been somewhat proHx 
 concerning the reasons for that popularity, this 
 comes from the fact that it recalls the kindly man 
 who opened the gates of a college to his grand- 
 nephew Alphonse Daudet, when, long afterward, 
 hardly [6 years old at the time and yet obliged to 
 earn his own livelihood, the latter went to that 
 college to beg for a place as schoolmaster. Read 
 again an account of the sufiferings of Le Petit 
 Chose when he became an usher at the college of 
 Sarlande. 
 
 I have still to speak of the other three Reynaud 
 sons and will do so briefly. 
 
 Baptiste, one of them, left at an early age for 
 Paris. Having entered a shop as apprentice with 
 the hat-maker for the court, the celebrated Le- 
 moine, his intelligence and handsome appearance 
 caused him to be used for " outside." It was he 
 who went to the Tuileries to try on the bonnets for 
 the queen and princesses, and in the same way he 
 went to the social queens in fashion at the moment 
 and to the fops of the period. In such surround- 
 ings he quickly acquired a most varied store of 
 information and was soon thoroughly acquainted 
 with the gossip of the fashionable society of the 
 day. And, indeed, how many recollections did 
 his memory not preserve concerning that famous 
 time !
 
 2,00 AlpJioiisc Daudet. 
 
 Uncle Baptiste is the only one of our great-uncles 
 whom Alphonse and I have known. He was al- 
 ready an old man, but as clean, fresh and rosy as 
 in the days of his handsome youth, speaking little 
 however of his past in our presence, since we were 
 only children. What we know about him is derived 
 from the stories told to the family. He liked to 
 talk about his sojourn in Paris and the people with 
 whom he was more or less intimately acquainted, 
 amongst others Collin d'Harleville, as well as about 
 his campaigns as a volunteer in the army under 
 Dumouriez. 
 
 There is mention of uncle Baptiste in Le Petit 
 Chose. But this character in a novel had nothing 
 in common with our ancestor save the name. Al- 
 phonse Daudet built him up out of bits and pieces, 
 that is to say, out of various characteristics bor- 
 rowed from the family. 
 
 The two younger brothers of Baptiste who were 
 called Louis and Antoine were far from having a 
 destiny so adventurous as their elders. Both of 
 them took wives in the Vivarais not far from the 
 paternal mansion. Louis stayed there, but An- 
 toine, he who was our maternal grandfather, having 
 become a widower, left the country toward the end 
 of the century in order to go to Nimes, where he 
 established himself and created an important house 
 for the buying and sale of silks. 
 
 At that time the growers of silk-worms in the 
 Cevennes and the Vivarais and the little silk-spin- 
 ners went to Nimes and offered their products there. 
 For several days at a time they might be seen
 
 My Brother and I. 301 
 
 wandering about the town in their raw-silk coats 
 with very short tails, their thick stockings of black 
 wool, their heavy iron-bound shoes, and their hair 
 in a cue, doing impromptu business on this moving 
 market. In such cases every operation was done 
 in solid financial fashion with fine big silver pieces, 
 and, since a kilogram of silk was worth from 50 to 
 80 francs, there used to be a clinking of gold and 
 silver pieces in the shops where the mountaineers 
 bought their goods which would have made Har- 
 pagon rub his hands with delight. Then, the sales 
 finished, these sturdy fellows set out upon their 
 return, bowed down beneath the weight of their 
 parcels, this one to Vigan, that one to Largentiere 
 and the other to Villefort. 
 
 This industry, which for a long while enriched 
 the inhabitants of Languedoc, Provence and the 
 Comtat, is quite dead to-day, killed by the silk- 
 worm cholera. The crisis which was the ruin of 
 the south of France had its origin there. Then 
 there came various chemical discoveries that put 
 a stop to the production of madder, which was 
 such a flourishing one in the department of Vau- 
 cluse, and finally the phylloxera gave it the last 
 blow. The most firmly established fortunes were 
 not able to stand the strain. But at the moment 
 concerning which we speak people were very far 
 from foreseeing such catastrophes, and the South, 
 like all of France, allowed itself to be carried along 
 by the profitable commercial movement which 
 reached its greatest development under the Res- 
 toration.
 
 302 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 Antoine Reynaud was one of those in Nimes 
 who knew best how to profit by it. He had be- 
 come one of the most important silk-buyers in the 
 South. He then sold again to the large weavers 
 of Nimes, Avignon and Lyon, supporting the 
 rivalship of similar products from Lombardy and 
 Piedmont in all these different markets. In this 
 trade he accumulated a fine fortune, assisted by 
 my grandmother, for toward 1 798 he had married 
 again and this time with a young woman born 
 like him in the Vivarais, whom he had met when 
 going to visit his elder brother at La Vignasse.
 
 My Brother and I. 303 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Our grandmother died several years before my 
 birth, but I have heard her spoken of often enough 
 to assert that she was not an ordinary person. A 
 plebeian with warm blood, and a convinced Royal- 
 ist who had been tried by the harsh suffering 
 under the Terror, she recalled by her beauty, her 
 sculpturesque forms and her eyes widely carved 
 in their sockets some of the portraits of the painter 
 David. 
 
 When Antoine Reynaud knew her he was twenty 
 years old ; she too was a widow, her first husband 
 having been shot in one of the tumults in the 
 Lozere, to appease which the Convention sent 
 thither one of its members, Chateauneuf-Randon. 
 
 One son remained from the first marriage. She 
 had undergone most frightful perils with him. De- 
 nounced as a Royalist at the same time with her 
 husband, she had fled for safety to Nimes, where 
 a part of her family lived, whilst he escaped the 
 other way. She lived there in utmost quiet and 
 hidden away, awaiting the end of the black days 
 of Terror. One morning she had the imprudence 
 to go out with her child on her arm, and destiny
 
 304 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 fore-ordained that she should come across the 
 march of the Goddess Reason, who was being 
 carried in solemn procession through the streets; 
 moreover, fate must needs decree that the citizen- 
 ess to whom this lofty but transitory dignity was 
 awarded should recognize our grandmother in the 
 street ! As far off as she could see her she began 
 to call to her, screaming out: — 
 
 " Frangoise ! On your knees ! " 
 
 My grandmother was hardly seventeen years old 
 at the time and was gifted with quick repartee 
 and a turn for irony. To this order on the part of 
 the Goddess Reason she replied with a gesture 
 fitter for a street boy. The mob rushed upon her 
 crying, " Zou ! Zou ! " 
 
 She took flight through the town, pressing her 
 child to her breast and reached a suburb where 
 she managed to return to her house by way of 
 gardens, but only by passing along the narrow rim 
 of a cistern at the greatest risk of falling in. As 
 she said later in life: "No cat could have done 
 what I did that day ! " 
 
 For the moment she had saved her life, but too 
 many perils were about and her safety demanded 
 that she should not remain longer in Nimes. That 
 very evening she left for the Vivarais. 
 
 She had to make part of the trip on foot, march- 
 ing by short stages and finding refuge at the end 
 of her heavy tramps in some farm or in the house 
 of one of those curates of the constitution to whom 
 kindly souls recommended her. It was during this 
 march, whilst shaken by the most cruel fits of
 
 My Brother ayid I. 305 
 
 anguish, that she heard of the death of her 
 husband. 
 
 The night before she had arrived at a wretched 
 village called Les Mages and asked for a lodging at 
 the priest's house ; on entering the bed-chamber 
 which had been set apart for her she had been im- 
 pressed by a presentiment of sorrow. The ceme- 
 tery lay immediately beneath her windows and the 
 moon outlined the crosses on the tombs in black 
 against the gray. It was impossible for her to sleep. 
 
 Then the child she was suckling was seized by 
 terror in its turn. Red in the face and with strain- 
 ing haggard eyes, the poor little wretch grieved 
 and cried the whole night, moving about continu- 
 ously in the arms of its mother, who in vain tried 
 to quiet it. 
 
 A few hours later my grandmother learned that 
 her husband was dead, having been shot not far 
 from there, at dawn, by the republican soldiers. 
 She never ceased to believe that her son had a 
 vision of the execution of his father during that 
 frightful night. 
 
 As a result of these emotions she lost her milk 
 and the child was turned over to its grandparents 
 and was brought up on the milk of a goat. As 
 to my grandmother, her appearance had been 
 carefully described and spread throughout the 
 countryside and the rural police were on her track. 
 Then she began the roving existence of a fugitive, 
 roaming hither and thither under various disguises 
 and only returning to the house to sleep. 
 
 Through a very singular circumstance the only 
 20
 
 3o6 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 person who knew the secret of her concealment 
 was an ardent repubhcan patriot, the mistress of 
 one of the men of the Convention who was acting 
 as commissioner in the Vivarais and the Gevaudan. 
 This woman conceived the greatest sympathy and 
 pity for the proscribed one ; she kept her informed 
 of all the measures taken to seize her, and every 
 morning my grandmother would absent herself 
 from the places where her liberty was more than 
 commonly menaced. 
 
 Nevertheless, one day that she was seated on 
 the edge of a road, broken by fatigue and clad like 
 a poor goatherd, she saw two policemen appear, 
 who asked her whether she had not seen " the 
 woman called Fran^oise Robert " pass that way, 
 that being her own name. As you may well be- 
 lieve, she answered in the negative. The police- 
 men having asked her to which village she was 
 bound, she mentioned one in the neighborhood 
 haphazard. 
 
 " That 's just the place we 're going to ! " an- 
 swered one of them twisting his moustache in the 
 most gallant fashion. " Jump up behind me, and 
 we will take you there." 
 
 Weeping copiously, she protested that she was 
 a good girl, and the policemen, pitying her case, 
 left her after making excuses for their conduct. 
 
 Another time, having caught sight of the rural 
 police at the end of a road on which she was, she 
 rushed into a meadow where a shepherd was feed- 
 ing his sheep ; thrusting a piece of silver into his 
 hand, she seized his hat and cloak, put the hat
 
 My Brother and L 307 
 
 on her head and the cloak about her shoulders, 
 saying: 
 
 " My dear man, do not betray me; I am your 
 herd-boy." 
 
 The shepherd kept silence and the policeman 
 passed without the slightest idea that the little 
 herd-boy whose tattered felt hat covered his face 
 knd hair completely, who seemed half asleep as 
 he lent on his shepherd staff, was no other than 
 that Frangoise Robert whom they had been seek- 
 ing in vain for so many days. 
 
 Four years had passed after these events when 
 Antoine Reynaud met FranQoise. He took a great 
 fancy to her, married her, adopted her son and 
 took her to Nimes. Our grandmother was the 
 owner of an uncommon mind and possessed un- 
 usual courage. These qualities became all the 
 better in her new husband's house and produced 
 excellent results. She raised herself socially along 
 with him and on no occasion did she find her- 
 self below that station in society which he had 
 been able to win little by little. She proved a lov- 
 ing and faithful comrade in life as well as a dis- 
 creet and safe helpmeet. She contributed her full 
 share to the establishment of that fortune which 
 unhappily was not destined to survive her long, 
 but which she had the merit of having to a large 
 extent built up. 
 
 A big volume might be filled with interesting 
 traits of our grandmother — the courage she 
 showed one evening when her husband was the 
 victim of an attempt at assassination; her exhibi-
 
 3o8 Alphonse Datidet. 
 
 tions of hatred against Napoleon ; her joy at the 
 return of the Bourbons and all the episodes of an 
 honest and energetic life of a citizen. At the 
 same time she had the very deuce of a " go," a de- 
 cisiveness of mind that is rarely found in women, 
 a singular knack of overcoming difficulties, the 
 boldness of a ,man, a vigorous temperament and a 
 health which flourished notwithstanding the wear- 
 ing fatigues of successive childbirths. 
 
 It was under the Restoration that the fortune of 
 our grandparents reached high-water mark. At 
 that time they had six children, including the one 
 by the former husband, who was treated like the 
 others : three sons and three daughters. All these 
 little creatures grew up in easy circumstances. 
 Trade carefully managed caused the waters of Pac- 
 tolus to flow through the house. Mme. Reynaud 
 held a fine place in society, where her views of 
 things were the law ; she had her box at the theatre 
 and a good property several leagues from the city. 
 
 She was present at every social gathering and 
 more especially those which followed the return of 
 the Bourbons. Toward 1829, when the Daudets 
 held close business relations with the Reynauds, 
 this prosperity had only increased and it seemed 
 as if it were not possible that its spring should be 
 weakened. 
 
 Such was the family into which young Vincent 
 Daudet dreamed of entering. The oldest of the 
 Reynaud girls was called Adeline. She was a thin 
 and frail-looking body with an olive-brown com- 
 plexion and big mournful eyes ; her physical de-
 
 My Brother and I. 309 
 
 velopment had been delayed by some childish 
 malady. She was a dreamy, romantic nature, pas- 
 sionately fond of reading and loving better to live 
 with the heroes of her imagination and their de- 
 lightful stories than with the realities of actual life, 
 yet all the same she had the soul of a saint and an 
 infinite kindliness and urbanity. She it was whom 
 Vincent Daudet had dared to reach with his love, 
 without fearing the distance that separated them. 
 
 At first his project seemed rather ambitious to 
 his parents themselves. The Reynauds were at 
 the head of the business in Nimes ; the eldest son 
 had just made a matrimonial alliance with the 
 Sabrans of Lyon, and the second managed an im- 
 portant commission house in that city. It meant 
 a great deal of audacity merely to be what Vincent 
 Daudet then was and to endeavor to make an 
 alliance with them. Nevertheless he stated his 
 demand and friends intervened to plead his cause 
 and overcome the resistance, which was particularly 
 aroused by the two brothers of Mdlle. Adeline set- 
 tled in Lyon, for they hoped for a far more bril- 
 liant marriage for their sister. Luckily, when 
 Mdlle. Adeline was consulted, she cut the matter 
 short by declaring that she was well pleased. 
 
 The marriage took place near the beginning of 
 1830 at the very moment that Vincent Daudet, 
 who had become a person of importance through 
 his entrance into the Reynaud family, entered into 
 partnership with his brother to continue the busi- 
 ness of their father. 
 
 The earlier years of the new marriage were sad-
 
 3IO Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 dened by a long list of domestic troubles. My 
 parents lost their first children one after the other, 
 with the exception of the first-born, a boy whose 
 feeble health caused them a thousand disquiets. 
 Grandmother Reynaud died very suddenly, carried 
 off by an affection of the lungs. One of her sons 
 in Lyon squandered a large part of the common 
 capital intrusted to his care in imprudent specula- 
 tions. And finally my father was not able to get 
 on long with his brother. Their partnership was 
 dissolved and replaced by a rivalry in business 
 during the course of which my uncle, who was 
 luckier or cleverer, built up a fortune which his 
 children have inherited in peace, whilst my father 
 compromised his own in inventions which rarely 
 came to any sound results. 
 
 Alphonse Daudet came into the world just ten 
 years after this marriage, the story and beginnings 
 of which I have thought it necessary to relate at 
 the same time with the story of our family.
 
 My Brother and I. 311 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 " I WAS born the 13th of May 18 — in a Langue- 
 doc town, where, as in all the towns in the 
 South of France, a great deal of sun and no little 
 dust may be found along with two or three Roman 
 monuments." These are the words in which 
 Alphonse Daudet tells of his birth on the first 
 page of Le Petit Chose, that one of his novels into 
 which he has placed the most of himself, at least in 
 the early part of it. 
 
 The town which he describes in this way is 
 Nimes. He was born there on the 13th of May 
 1840, three years after me, in the second story of 
 the Sabran mansion which our parents inhabited 
 from the time of their marriage. At the moment 
 he was the third of the living children. 
 
 The oldest was called Henri — a fine artistic 
 soul, high-strung and mystical, and a musician to 
 his very marrow, who died at twenty-four years as 
 a professor in the College of the Assumption at 
 Nimes, just on the point of entering into orders. 
 Memory of this sad recollection has inspired one 
 of the most eloquent pages in Le Petit Chose, 
 that moving chapter entitled " He is dead ! Pray 
 for his soul ! "
 
 312 Alphonse Dmidet. 
 
 The younger brother was the one who tells this 
 story. 
 
 In 1848 the family was increased by the arrival 
 of a girl who is married at present to M. Leon 
 Allard, brother of Mme. Alphonse Daudet; he has 
 contributed to various papers romances written in 
 a refined style that reveals a rare talent for writing. 
 
 That Sabran mansion where we came into the 
 world still stands on the Petit-Cours almost oppo- 
 site the Church of St. Charles, behind which the 
 Enclos de Rey extends, that terrible Royalist 
 suburb, whose inhabitants, tafifetassiers (silk-weav- 
 ers) or laborers in the fields, have for a century 
 furnished a noisy and rude contingent to all the 
 revolutions and riots in the old Roman city. 
 
 At one of the ends of the Petit-Cours is the 
 square of the Carmes, at the other the Ballore 
 square. 
 
 All the political life of Nimes was condensed in 
 the past between those two points ; they are con- 
 venient for popular assemblages and are connected 
 together by a wide avenue planted with a double 
 row of plane-trees, trees which each summer 
 powders with a fine white dust down to the 
 smallest leaf, filling with cicadas their crackling 
 branches on which the bark is all burned by the 
 sun. 
 
 The bloodiest episodes of the Revolution and 
 the tragical scenes of the "bagarre" were played 
 out upon the stage of the Petit-Cours. 
 
 There in 181 5 it was that Gen. Gilly, flying to 
 Nimes the day after the battle of Waterloo in
 
 My Brother and I. 313 
 
 order to throw himself into the hills of the 
 Cevennes, marched in procession at the head of his 
 chasseurs, rage in his heart, anger in his eyes, his 
 bridle between his teeth, a pistol in one hand and 
 a sword in the other, and abandoned the Bona- 
 partists to the horrors of a criminal reaction, which 
 was all too easy to understand in view of the 
 treatment which the Catholics had undergone 
 during the Hundred Days. 
 
 There again in 1831 it was that the Catholics 
 met together in threatening groups when the 
 authorities " dropped the crosses " — a recollec- 
 tion to be kept in mind, since it recalls to the wit- 
 nesses of scenes in those distant times the exag- 
 geration natural to Southern temperaments and 
 their violence, the spectacle, namely, of men savage 
 in their appearance ranged in the lines of a proces- 
 sion, men who sang the Psalms of Penitence and 
 at the same time uttered frightful oaths against the 
 " usurper"; of women with dishevelled hair, their 
 arms folded over their heads, uttering cries of dis- 
 tress; of priests running about through these 
 groups with the manner of martyrs and preaching 
 resignation with their lips yet with revolution in 
 their eyes, all the while that under the protection 
 of armed forces the authorities were most respect- 
 fully causing to be deposited within the churches 
 the crosses that had formerly stood upon the pub- 
 lic squares ! These crosses had been raised during 
 the missions which took place under the Villele 
 ministry, when the Congregation was all-powerful. 
 
 Episodes of local history in Nimes have found
 
 314 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 other stages, for instance on the Esplanade, on the 
 Cours-Neuf, in the Arena and at the Carmes ; but 
 nowhere did they take on a more dangerous 
 appearance than along that same Petit-Cours, 
 where the Enclos de Rey debouches by five or six 
 streets and where for two years after my birth, 
 during the long July days, Catholics and Protes- 
 tants gave themselves up to one battle more with 
 stones as weapons. 
 
 How many a time during our infancy, while 
 breathing in the cool evening air before our house, 
 have we not been suddenly hurried indoors by our 
 nursemaid, whilst all about us men and women 
 were flying hither and thither, and from afar, 
 uttered by mouths rude in voice, rose the cry of: 
 " Zou ! zou ! " the ordinary signal for rows in 
 Nimes ! It meant that the battle had begun. It all 
 ended, however, merely in bruises and scratches 
 and broken panes. The police let things go and 
 the battle ended through lack of fighters. 
 
 It is scarcely unknown that my brother, along 
 with a good deal of truth, put a good deal of fancy 
 into Le Petit Chose. It was fanc)'' when he wrote : 
 " I was the evil star of my parents. From the day 
 of my birth incredible disasters fell upon them from 
 twenty directions." 
 
 On the contrary, it would be more exact to say 
 that at that very moment there was a respite in the 
 worries of our family; the business outlook ap- 
 peared more prosperous ; fresh catastrophes did 
 not occur until later, in 1846 and 1847 and 1848, 
 the epoch when the general ruin was finished. At
 
 My Brother and I. 315 
 
 first we knew nothing but domestic well-being; 
 we grew up side by side in an atmosphere of ten- 
 derness and an intimate relationship, hour by hour, 
 which created between us that indestructible friend- 
 ship which has always been just as lively as ever 
 and has never been a single day denied. 
 
 At that epoch the old Sabran mansion was 
 filled with our games. The shops of Vincent 
 Daudet were on the first story and on the same 
 floor those of one of the cousins, a maker of shawls. 
 Children were severely exiled from the Vincent 
 Daudet part. If they showed their rosy faces and 
 bright locks at the door, one look from the father 
 caused them to fly at the swiftest pace ; but on the 
 cousin's side they were more friendly. 
 
 There was an old clerk there who adored little 
 children. He made beautiful paper hats for us all 
 decked with plumes ; he fabricated epaulets from 
 the remains of fringes of shawls, he armed us with 
 wooden swords, and just above our lips he drew 
 terrible moustaches with burnt cork. In such guise 
 as this did we ascend to show ourselves to our 
 mother, whom we oftenest found plunged in some 
 book. 
 
 A passionate love for books which she com- 
 municated to us has been one of the consolations 
 of her life. As a child she used to seek a refuge at 
 the back of her father's shop, where she would 
 hide herself between the bales of silk in order to 
 read without being interrupted. Later it was to 
 reading once more that she consecrated all her 
 leisure hours. It is undeniable that we get from
 
 3i6 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 her that vocation which has caused us later to 
 plunge into literary life. 
 
 When I examine my memory in an attempt to 
 recollect what my brother looked like as a child, 
 I see a handsome little boy three or four years 
 old with large brown eyes, chestnut locks, a pale 
 complexion and features of exquisite delicacy. At 
 the same time I recall most terrible angers and 
 half tragic revolts against the punishments which 
 they brought upon him. 
 
 One day, in consequence of I know not what 
 naughtiness, he was locked up alone in a bedroom. 
 He beat about in it with such extraordinary vio- 
 lence that it was necessary to open the door of 
 the improvised prison. He came out all bruised by 
 the hurts that he had voluntarily given himself by 
 throwing himself head-foremost against the walls. 
 
 He inherited from our grandmothers and espe- 
 cially from our father that tendency to anger 
 which he has overcome by a tremendous effort of 
 will since he has grown up ; but as a child that 
 was the dominant trait of his character and it was 
 hard enough to bring him up. He was the most 
 extraordinary mixture of docility and lack of disci" 
 pline, kindliness and wrong-headedness ; and along 
 with that went an inextinguishable thirst for adven- 
 tures and the unknown, a thirst which his short- 
 sightedness, increasing with age, aggravated to the 
 point of danger. 
 
 This short-sightedness has played my brother 
 the vilest tricks ; turn and turn about, he has 
 drowned, burned, poisoned and got himself run
 
 My Brother and I. 317 
 
 over; even at the present day (1881) it obliges 
 him to ask the help of a friendly arm in order to 
 cross the boulevard at the hour when it is crowded 
 with carriages, and it has often caused people, 
 whom he has passed close by without seeing them, 
 to believe that he pretended not to greet them 
 through indifiference or disdain. 
 
 But at the same time it has rendered him an 
 important service: it has forced upon him the 
 necessity of living within himself; it has gifted him 
 with the strangest and most precious faculty which 
 I have met with only in him, a sort of inward look, 
 or, if you prefer, an intuition of extraordinary power, 
 in consequence of which it has happened that when 
 he cannot see with his eyes the face of any one talk- 
 ing to him, he divines the features of his inter- 
 locutor and at the same time divines his thought. 
 Such an intensity of vision in a short-sighted man 
 is a matter which I cannot explain to myself. He 
 is like a blind man groping about through life, and 
 yet in every one of his books he gives a proof of 
 the most minute and attentive observation, almost 
 as if with the aid of an enlarging glass. 
 
 These qualities seen in the grown person were 
 still slumbering in the child, who was dominated 
 by a liveliness and turbulence and boldness which 
 made our mother tremble whenever she did not 
 feel him fast to her skirts, or directly within the 
 sight of our maid. But at the same time his 
 nature was the most direct, his heart the most 
 generous and his mind the most active of any. 
 Oh ! what a delightful little comrade I had there !
 
 3i8 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Among the very keenest of our delights in this 
 world must be reckoned our family excursions 
 on Sunday. Generally they were toward some vil- 
 lage in the neighborhood, such as Marguerites or 
 Manduel, Fons or Monfrin. At the last mentioned 
 lived our foster-parents, honest people living very 
 comfortably, who were tenderly in love with the 
 child that had been nursed under their roof and 
 always delighted to see him again in company 
 with his own parents. After the death of my 
 grandmother the property Font du Roi had been 
 sold. So it was necessary to go in search of the 
 fine air of the country somewhere else, and that 
 is why we were taken to the farms of our foster- 
 parents, first to one and then to the other. 
 
 Early in the morning we set out in the big 
 coach into which we piled, big and little, with a 
 half dozen handsome uncles and male and female 
 cousins of our age, and after a fine-journey in the 
 sunshine over turnpikes white with dust, between 
 vineyards and olive orchards, our stop at last made 
 pleasant by rich meals and long walks through the 
 fields, we returned at nightfall by the light of the 
 moon, we children half asleep, but listening to
 
 My Brother and I. 319 
 
 the ballads and romances which our elders sang 
 in chorus. 
 
 Another goal for long walks was La Vigne, 
 a little property which lay near the gates of the 
 city among the small macets (cabins) scattered 
 about among the garridcs (stony, sterile fields) 
 all baked by the sun, where no other protection 
 from the heat could be found save an arbor cov- 
 ered with vines ; there we often took our supper 
 during the summer evenings after having passed 
 many an hour devouring grapes — oeillades and 
 clairettes — which our little hands plucked from 
 the upright stocks crowded with leaves and clus- 
 ters, vines raised with difficulty above a soil har- 
 dened by the long droughts of the summer. 
 
 That modest property was not more than a few 
 acres, yet it possessed a monumental gateway in 
 iron which helped to make it seem as big to us 
 as the whole country. Down the centre ran a 
 path edged with box and dwarf rose bushes ; to 
 the right and left were the vines, and they shared 
 the territory with almond and olive trees ; at the 
 bottom of the plot was a clover-field where our 
 father used to hunt larks with a mirror; a tumble- 
 down wall ran about it composed of stones placed 
 one upon the other without cement like all the 
 walls in that part of the world. What delightful 
 days have we not passed in La Vigne ! 
 
 On returning from the vineyard we would stop 
 at the factory where the scarfs were colored which 
 the Uaudet house at that time despatched through- 
 out France, into Italy and Spain, and even as far
 
 320 Alpko72se Daudet. 
 
 as Algiers. Beyond the workshop there was a 
 decidedly nice garden ; there we were apt to call 
 a halt before entering the town itself and take the 
 occasion to pluck a few hatfuls of fruit. 
 
 Whilst considering these distant recollections I 
 cannot pass over in silence the season for the fair 
 at Beaucaire which returned with great exactness 
 every year. At such times the Daudet house 
 transferred itself with merchandise and all its older 
 members to that little town, one that for many 
 centuries was among the most important markets 
 of Europe. You will find a very picturesque 
 description of this fair at Beaucaire in Numa 
 Roumestan. 
 
 " It was the holiday of the year in our Southern 
 provinces, the one attraction for all those shrivelled 
 lives ; a long while before it occurred people got 
 ready for it and a long while afterwards people 
 talked of it. It was a reward which a man would 
 promise to his wife or children, and if he could 
 not take them with him he would always bring 
 back from it some piece of Spanish lace or a play- 
 thing which they would find at the bottom of his 
 packet. The fair of Beaucaire, making business its 
 pretext, meant also a fortnight or a full month given 
 up to the free, exuberant and unexpected exist- 
 ence of a Bohemian encampment. People slept 
 here and there in the homes of the inhabitants, or 
 on the counters in the shops, or even in the street 
 under the canvas of the carts, beneath the warm 
 light of the July stars. How delightful was busi- 
 ness transacted without the boredom of the shop
 
 My Brother and I. 321 
 
 and matters of finance effected whilst dining at the 
 door in shirt-sleeves ! Then, all the booths set up 
 in a line along the meadow on the banks of the 
 Rhone, the river itself being nothing but a moving 
 fair-ground where boats of every shape bobbed 
 up and down — laJmts with lateen sails coming 
 from Aries, Marseille, Barcelona and the Balearic 
 Islands laden with wines, anchovies, cork and 
 oranges, all adorned with gorgeous banners and 
 streamers slapping and snapping in the lively 
 vvind and all reflected in the swiftly-flowing water ! 
 And then such an uproar from that many-colored 
 crowd of Spaniards, Sardinians, Greeks in long 
 tunics and embroidered slippers. Armenians in 
 furred caps and Turks in their befrogged waist- 
 coats, with their broad fans and wide breeches of 
 gray linen, all of them crowding into the open-air 
 restaurants ; and then the lines of tables covered 
 with toys for children, canes, umbrellas, silverware, 
 pastils of the harem, hats and caps, etc." 
 
 Although Nimes was hardly six leagues distant 
 from Beaucaire we little ones were not taken to 
 the fair ; we were left at home. But the house 
 was turned over to us ; we ruled there like little 
 sovereigns, and God knows with what a noise we 
 filled it ! Then, when they came back, our father 
 brought us a souvenir which constituted the crown 
 and culmination of the period of loose discipline, 
 of spoiling and a free and easy life — a whip or a 
 box of geographical blocks, a sword or a trumpet, 
 things of little value which delighted us be)'ond 
 measure. 
 
 21
 
 32 2 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 Rarely did children ever have more playthings 
 than we. During his sickly infancy our elder 
 brother Henri had been overwhelmed with them, 
 and when his studies began he turned them all 
 over to us, and then the mass grew still larger by 
 the addition of those which were given to us. 
 
 Grandfather Daudet, however, was not much of 
 a bestower of gifts. Economical to the rigor 
 point throughout his life, his largess to his grand- 
 children never went further than a box of pepper- 
 mints, which he thrust into each one's pocket on 
 New Year's Day after they had presented him 
 with the compliments of the season. 
 
 Grandfather Reynaud was entirely different. 
 His only pleasure consisted in making us happy 
 and enjoying our surprise and delight. Christmas- 
 eve or New Year's Day, or the Day of the Magi, 
 were just so many pretexts for luxuries and gifts. 
 
 Oh what memories of New Year's Day in our 
 childhood ! — meetings at grandfather's house at 
 noon for dinner, the recitation acquired with such 
 difficulty and mumbled over with impatient lips, 
 whilst little eyes rolled round to stare at the side-, 
 board crammed with eatables and playthings — 
 jumping-jacks, accordions, wooden horses and 
 sheep, dolls and I know not what more ! Then 
 the distribution of the presents accompanied by the 
 wild excitement of desires set in liveliest motion ; 
 the dinner composed of the most delicate tidbits, 
 pastries made by old Sophie, brandade of codfish 
 from Cadet's kitchen, " estevenos " (cakes) from 
 Villaret the pastrycook, nougats from Barth^lemy
 
 My Brother a7id T. 323 
 
 the confectioner, sweetmeats in shapes of people 
 and sugarplums in paper crackers ! Then our dances 
 down the big blue drawing-room, which was never 
 opened except on that day, whilst our elders con- 
 tinued their discussions among themselves. 
 
 So it was that, thanks to our elder brother and 
 Grandfather Reynaud, Alphonse and I possessed 
 enough playthings to sell. Before he made away 
 with them all, owing to his terrible craze for know- 
 ing what they looked like inside, we had filled an 
 entire room with them at the Vallongue Street 
 house into which we moved in 1844. 
 
 About that time we were already fitting up 
 theatres with the actors all of wood or cardboard 
 and were already inventing plays. I was very 
 skilful in dressing our actors. One day when I 
 had just finished dressing a little articulated doll as 
 a page, Alphonse arranged a fine scene in order 
 to make use of this masterpiece from my hands ; 
 I regret very much that I did not keep it, for it 
 was his beginning as a dramatist. 
 
 Among other playthings which we possessed 
 there was an entire furniture for a chapel suited to 
 children of our size ; nothing was lacking, neither 
 altar, candlesticks, tabernacle, chalice, pyx, nor 
 host. Our mother had cut the cloth for the altar 
 from an old embroidered gown and sewed the alb 
 and surplice, while one of our uncles at Lyon had 
 sent us chasuble, cross and mitre. 
 
 The materials for this little church had remained 
 a long while unused and in reserve, but one fine 
 day they were presented to us outright. Then
 
 324 Alp house Daiidet. 
 
 only began our religious ceremonies, salutations, 
 benedictions and processions through the great 
 garrets where our father had placed the working 
 benches for the women who carded the silk. 
 
 These ourdissenses or carders of silk, five or six 
 in number, were good girls and for the most part 
 very devout ones, who took great pleasure in 
 hearing us sing the canticles. Very often our 
 girl cousins, Emma and Maria, with their brother 
 L6once, a fine boy who was killed at Pont-Noyelles 
 in the war of 1870, and a few of our friends came 
 in for the purpose of taking part in our games. 
 It was at that time the episode occurred which we 
 still call in the family the story of the Virgin 
 Mary. 
 
 On that day we had draped with the white alb 
 our cousin Emma, a pretty brunette of our own 
 age and had crowned her with roses and placed 
 her seated in a big basket for silk bobbins lent 
 us by the carding girls, and so we carried her 
 solemnly in procession just as the Virgin Mary is 
 borne along above a reliquary ; and so we went 
 through the house, chanting religious songs such 
 as our memory was full of. We had divided all 
 the other ornaments up among ourselves, one 
 carrying the chasuble, the other the mitre and 
 the third the cross. Dressed in the proper gown, 
 Alphonse played choir boy and marched at the 
 head of the procession with a bell in his hand. 
 
 Bad luck willed it that at that very moment my 
 father was receiving an important customer from 
 Lyon.
 
 My Brother a7id I. 325 
 
 Bothered by our noise, he sent us word to be 
 quiet, but we neglected to take much notice of 
 the warning. Patience was not exactly Vincent 
 Daudet's virtue, and when he did get angry it was 
 no light matter. All of a sudden he appeared on 
 the threshold of the workshop where the proces- 
 sion was just about to end before the brilliantly 
 lighted altar ; with the back of his hand he sent 
 the choir boy and the bell rolling over the floor, 
 and then, as every one tried to escape, he seized 
 the reliquary just as one would an ordinary coal- 
 scuttle, and grabbing the Virgin Mary on the fly, 
 he tore the white alb from top to bottom and 
 made her crown skip through the air. That eve- 
 ning he notified my mother, in whose absence this 
 tragi-comic scene had passed, that he had had 
 enough of those ceremonies and canticles in his 
 house ! 
 
 We children therefore returned to the little 
 room where the playthings were and passed our 
 recreation hours there. Later on we were ad- 
 mitted to a larger room at the end of the apart- 
 ment and there under Henri's direction a theatre 
 was arranged in which he rehearsed one of Ber- 
 quin's plays with several comrades. Although 
 they were simply scraps of boys their services 
 were accepted. We had our part in a representa- 
 tion before the family, which was given on a 
 Thursday and in good truth only obtained a 
 " success of esteem." 
 
 About that time our dear father brought us one 
 day on his return from the Fair at Beaucaire a
 
 326 Alpho7ise Daudet, 
 
 Robinson Crusoe in two illustrated volumes, a Swiss 
 Family Robinson and the jFoiirnal des Enfants 
 bound in six big volumes, full of stories signed 
 Jules Janin, Fr^d^ric Souli6, Louis Desnoyers, 
 Ernest Fouinet, fidouard Ourliac and Eugenie 
 Foa. Then it was that for the first time we read 
 the Aventnres de Jean- Paul Chopart as well as the 
 A ventures de Robert Robert et de so?i Compagnon 
 Toussaint Lavenette, and the ThMtre dn Seigneur 
 Croquignole , the Mysth'es du ChAteau de Pierrefitte 
 and Leon et Leonie and a hundred other stories 
 written for children of our age, veritable little 
 masterpieces for the most part, which have left 
 an ineffaceable trace upon our memory and exer- 
 cised so lively an impression upon our childhood 
 that even to-day, when one of these volumes, all 
 worn and torn, happens to come across our path, 
 a crowd of memories of the distant past rises from 
 its dog-eared pages.
 
 My Brother and I. 327 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 In the month of September, 1846, our parents 
 resolved to have me begin my Latin studies. Up 
 to that time our education had been left to the 
 Brothers of the Christian Doctrine to whom those 
 families of Catholic faith who were best to do, did 
 not scorn to send their children — as an example. 
 They taught me to read and write and gave me 
 some few ideas of sacred history and religious 
 instruction. Alphonse was left with them for 
 still another year. Our elder brother finished his 
 classes with an old professor named Verdilhan 
 who long before had started on his career as in- 
 structor under the auspices of our uncle the 
 Abb6. 
 
 As for me it was decided to send me as a day 
 scholar to the College of the Assumption, which 
 a vicar-general of the diocese was directing, namely 
 Abbe d'Alzon, who caused himself to be talked of 
 a great deal later on. 
 
 There it was that I took my first communion in 
 1848, the day before that on which the Archbishop 
 of Paris was killed on the barricades ; there I lived 
 two years under the charge of masters whose high- 
 strung opinions I have sometimes been compelled
 
 328 Alphonsc Daudet. 
 
 to disavow later, but who were almost all of 
 them eminent, affectionate and paternal men, ex- 
 tremely able in molding the mind and soul of 
 the children confided to their charge. 
 
 What decided my father to send me to the As- 
 sumption was the relative lowness of the charges 
 for day scholars. But in 1848 his fortune, which 
 had been receiving severe blows for two years 
 past, was completely undermined. 
 
 Successive failures of several of his clients carried 
 off one part of it, and then came the commercial 
 crisis and stagnation of business which followed 
 the Revolution, and lastly, to put a final touch to 
 all this list of catastrophes, came the death of 
 Grandfather Reynaud. 
 
 That exposed the depth of the abyss into which 
 his sons had allowed his fortune to disappear. 
 Our parents had been counting on that inheritance 
 in order to face difficulties which became every 
 day more inextricable. But they got nothing 
 from it. 
 
 It gave the signal for deep and wide divisions 
 in the family. The blackest sadness lay upon our 
 house and our dear mother never ceased from 
 weeping. Under the urgency of his cares my 
 father had become irritable and cranky; he wanted 
 to start a lawsuit against his brother-in-law and 
 flew into a rage with any one who attempted to 
 defend him or talk about a reconciliation. 
 
 The clearest point in the whole trouble was this, 
 that it was necessary to reduce expenses and live 
 with the strictest economy. I was taken away
 
 My Brother and /. 329 
 
 from the Assumption and went in turn to learn 
 from Father Verdilhan. Alphonse had entered 
 some months before the Canivet Institute, a 
 modest estabHshment where he penetrated Httle 
 by httle into the secret recesses of the Latin 
 grammar. 
 
 One justice must be given to our excellent father, 
 that, notwithstanding his disaster, he never dreamed 
 of economizing to our disadvantage nor of inter- 
 rupting our studies under the plea that he could 
 only pay the cost with great difficulty. 
 
 One of the family, who was a very practical 
 man and extremely rich, to whom my father was 
 in debt, mingled many counsels with incessant de- 
 mands for repayment. He loudly declared that 
 the firm intention to give us a solid education in 
 the absence of a fortune was the act of a man 
 filled with absurd pride. His opinion was that we 
 ought to be taught a good trade. If he had been 
 listened to, probably I should be a locksmith to- 
 day, and Alphonse would be handling the plane 
 and saw. 
 
 But Vincent Daudet did not hold to this opinion 
 at all; he persisted in trusting to the star of his 
 sons. It was one of our delights that we had 
 never betrayed that confidence. He therefore 
 looked another way for the means to economize. 
 We left the fine apartment in Vallongue Street to 
 establish ourselves in the factory, that factory on 
 the Avignon road, the remembrance of which, ever 
 vivid in Alphonse Daudet's mind, suggested to him 
 the first chapter of Lc Petit Chose.
 
 330 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 There were big rooms there and plenty of 
 air and space ; we were very comfortably in- 
 stalled. There we met together every evening 
 and my brother came in too, after his return from 
 school; there we passed our Thursdays and Sun- 
 days running about the courts upon which great 
 empty workshops opened, making mysterious rob- 
 ber dens for ourselves in the steam-engine which 
 was reduced to immobility and rolling about on 
 the grass in the garden under the fig-tree behind 
 the wall of lilacs. Cousins of both sexes come to 
 share our games and our noisy laughter made a 
 strange contrast with the agony of our parents 
 caused by the sickly silence of that vast factory, 
 where the sudden stoppage of all movement merely 
 hastened the complete ruin of the family. 
 
 Still, there were some bright clearings in the 
 darkness of our distress. In the first place there 
 was the marriage of our youngest aunt who had 
 come to live with us after the death of Grand- 
 father Reynaud, and the birth of our sister, which 
 sent a warm ray of sunlight through the whole 
 house, and finally the arrival of one of the Lyon 
 uncles who took up his abode under our roof. 
 
 In consequence of I know not what arrangement 
 he was to have the direction of the factory and the 
 color-room on the day that business should start 
 up again ; but what I am sure of is, that whilst 
 waiting for this rousing up from stagnation, which, 
 by the way, never occurred, he was practising his 
 future functions at a furious rate. He had brought 
 with him a great number of volumes, for the most
 
 My Brother and T. 331 
 
 part with illustrations, and he occupied all his time 
 in coloring these pictures. It was a regular craze ; 
 he colored everything that he could get hold of 
 and even illuminated a Spanish grammar. 
 
 This dear man adored my brother and lent him- 
 self to every one of his fancies ; he pushed his 
 weakness to the point of being an accomplice of 
 his naughtinesses by helping him to conceal them 
 and even went so far as to accuse me of them. 
 One fine morning, tired of coloring pictures, he 
 disappeared and we never saw him again. I really 
 believe that without knowing it he posed as one of 
 the characters in Le Nabab. In that novel there is 
 a certain cashier in the Caisse Territorial who has 
 a terrible likeness to him.
 
 332 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 AlJOTHER memory of this period is that of the 
 clubs. Our father had always taken great interest 
 in politics, but of course theoretically and with- 
 out the shadow of a personal ambition, although 
 like certain others he might have been able to 
 obtain an election as Deputy. At all times dur- 
 ing our meals, when the subject of business was 
 worn dry, the usual subject of his talks with our 
 mother consisted of politics, or rather, to speak 
 more exactly, the subject of his monologues. He 
 viewed public matters from the point of view of 
 his Royalist prejudices and would scarcely admit 
 any one to hold a contrary opinion. 
 
 In the little Cornand Club, whither he went 
 every day, he met with excellent fellows who were 
 filled with the same ideas, and particularly an 
 old judge who exerted a great influence on his 
 mind, an eloquent talker who explained events 
 with no little ingenuity and occupied himself in 
 forecasting what was to come. 
 
 He it was who, taking advantage of the presence 
 of one of the sons of the King at Nimes, went to 
 his hotel and left a card on which he had written 
 these verses : — •
 
 My Brother and I. t^-^^) 
 
 " Prince, ne croyez pas que le Fran9ais oublie 
 Les bienfaits dont il fut redevable k ses rois ; 
 lis sont. quoiqu'exil^s, presents k la patrie 
 Plus que I'usurpateur qui lui dicte des lois! " 
 
 And the excellent fellow was proud of what he con- 
 sidered an act of boldness and courage. Observe 
 that he was a judge, who could not be removed ; 
 such characteristics depict a whole race ! 
 
 Our father came back from the club to his 
 family filled with all he had been hearing and 
 repeated it to us whilst mixing in his own per- 
 sonal reflections. His entire political faith may 
 be summed up as follows: The Revolution of 
 1830 was a crime and France will always be un- 
 happy as long as the Bourbons have not recon- 
 quered their throne ; therefore people ought to 
 long for and hasten on the Restoration of the 
 rightful king. 
 
 Whilst expounding these political views he gen- 
 erally added a few harsh truths concerning " those 
 rebels " to whom he was pleased to attribute his 
 own financial ruin. From the earliest days we 
 can recall we have heard much talk concerning 
 Genoude and Lourdoueix and Madier-Montjau, 
 the man who " begged the pardon of God and 
 of men" for his conduct in 1830, and of Guizot, 
 Thiers and Odilon Barrot — God only knows with , 
 what bitterness some of them were treated ! Un- 
 der such views and ideas were we brought up ! 
 
 When the Revolution of 1848 had forcibly 
 arranged a great deal of leisure for our father, 
 poHtics absorbed him, and indeed that had be-
 
 334 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 come the sole preoccupation of all the French. 
 Nothing was talked about in our presence except 
 local rows, reviews of the National Guard, night 
 patrols, cares aroused by the mutinies in Paris and 
 the uncertainties of the morrow. 
 
 Our father constantly met the chiefs of the 
 Royalist party. At the approach of the elections 
 they made a demand upon him to open his work- 
 shops to assemblages in which their own candi- 
 dates might be able to appear and be heard. He 
 met their desire half-way and for several evenings, 
 whilst playing in the garden, we enjoyed the spec- 
 tacle of noisy meetings whose cause and object, 
 however, we did not in any way understand ; for 
 us they simply consisted in tumultuous discus- 
 sions, violent interruptions and especially in bro- 
 ken windows. After the elections it was necessary 
 to replace about a hundred panes of glass in the 
 windows. It is true that the list of Royalist 
 nominees had been elected. After that, silence 
 fell again and our life took on its usual features, 
 but it was for a short time only. A few weeks 
 after, the factory was sold to a congregation of 
 Carmelite monks who took up their abode there 
 and are living there to-day. 
 
 " It was a frightful blow," my brother has 
 written ; " heavens, how I wept ! You may believe 
 that I no longer had a heart to play. Oh ! no in- 
 deed ! . . . I went and seated myself in one place 
 after the other and looking round at all the objects 
 about me I talked to them as if they were human 
 beings ; I said to the plane trees : ' Farewell, my
 
 My Brother and I. 335 
 
 dearest friends,' and to the water-pools: 'All is at 
 an end, we shall never see each other again.' " 
 
 The imagination of the novelist evokes memories 
 of his youthful years when he has come to man's 
 estate. And that which is most sincere in these 
 recollections is the expression therein contained of 
 the sadness which befell him as a child. We had 
 bitter sorrow in leaving the places where the better 
 part of our childhood had flowed happily and 
 peacefully along. We went to live in a little apart- 
 ment in Seguier Street whilst our father left for 
 Lyon, where he hoped to retrieve his fortunes. In 
 Siguier Street we did not delay long before we re- 
 established much the same life that we passed at 
 the factory. We had there a garden also, but a 
 real garden with trees and flowers and an aban- 
 doned hothouse. Alphonse found there once 
 more his cabin and caves and Robinson Crusoe's 
 island, whilst a little girl, the daughter of the land- 
 lord, served him in place of a man Friday. But 
 after all he began to take less pleasure in these 
 games. He preferred the noisy recreations at the 
 Canivet school, rough play with comrades and 
 tricks at the expense of neighbors. 
 
 Among the latter was an old fellow who lived 
 quite alone like a savage in a house with a myste- 
 rious look, which was always shut. My brother 
 and one of his comrades thought it funny to go at 
 night after school hours and pull the bell of the 
 hermitage and then suddenly disappear, so that 
 when he came to open the door no one was there. 
 This conduct lasted eight days, but on the ninth
 
 336 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 the exasperated man lay in watch, and when, that 
 evening, the little fellows came up as usual to pull 
 his bell, he opened the door and appeared to them 
 with a frightful visage ; he sprang upon them, red 
 in the face and almost blind with fury. They fled 
 at the top of their speed and slipped into the side 
 street by our house which the night had filled with 
 darkness. Then, clambering swiftly up the stairs, 
 they rushed for refuge among us, almost crazed by 
 fear. The old man followed them into the dark 
 alley, but he did not know who they were and in- 
 stead of going to the left, he turned to the right 
 and fell with loud cries of distress down the steps 
 which led into the cellars. People ran up and 
 raised him almost motionless from bruises and car- 
 ried him back to his house. 
 
 This little adventure had no consequences ex- 
 cept that, as one may imagine, the bell was left 
 alone from that day onward. I had been the wit- 
 ness of the anguish and terrors of my brother and 
 thus I became a confidant of his schoolboy mon- 
 key-tricks and aided him to conceal them from 
 our parents. 
 
 This episode is the last I remember from that 
 period of our childhood. In the spring of 1849 
 we left for Lyon, where our father had discovered 
 a lucrative place. 
 
 My mother could not leave her family and her 
 dear Nimes without a heart-break and her sorrow 
 threw a veil of melancholy across the whole trip, 
 through which, however, I can still see various cir- 
 cumstances which were likely to impress the minds
 
 My Brother and I. ^^Zl 
 
 of children of our age — our journey in the coach 
 as far as Valence, the monotonous trip up the 
 Rhone in the steamboat, the arrival at Lyon, our 
 drive in a carriage along the quays with their high 
 black houses and our installation in a fourth story 
 on Lafont Street. Like Le Petit Chose I also am 
 able to exclaim : " Oh ! scenes and objects of my 
 childhood, what an impression have you not left 
 upon my mind ! "
 
 338 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 To-day that I am separated by more than thirty 
 years full of labor from the time which I describe, 
 turning the eyes of my memory back across 
 that long period, I ask myself what epoch of my 
 life was the most sorrowful, and all my past de- 
 clares that it was the time of our stay in Lyon. 
 And indeed that is exactly the impression which 
 I find in this passage from a study written by my 
 brother: " I recall a low sky the color of soot and 
 a fog perpetually rising from the two rivers. It 
 does not rain, it oozes with damp fog. And in the 
 enervation of a soft atmosphere the walls of the 
 houses weep, the pavement sweats and the balus- 
 trades of the stairways stick to the fingers. The 
 appearance of the townspeople, their gait and 
 language correspond with the moistness in the 
 air." 
 
 But beside these purely physical causes for the 
 sadness which the memory of LyOn always 
 awakes in me there are others entirely moral and 
 personal which I should be very sorry to conceal 
 here. I was approaching youthful manhood, and 
 my mind, which had been matured early by the 
 spectacle of the unhappiness of my parents, was, 
 to use the only word which would exactly describe
 
 My Brof/ier and I. 339 
 
 my thought, " precociously virilized " and at the 
 same time rendered melancholy. The perplex- 
 ities of my father and the tears of my mother fall- 
 ing upon my heart were far from making me well 
 disposed to the recreations natural to my age. 
 
 They developed in me a sickly sensibility, the 
 germ of which I got from my mother. I burst 
 into tears at the slightest thing, at the least bit of 
 reproach, or for some question which it embar- 
 rassed me to answer. Nobody understood what 
 was the matter and I understood nothing myself, 
 for I would have been considerably dashed if I 
 had had to explain the reason for my tears. In 
 Le Petit Chose, when my brother traced the 
 touching protrait of Jacques, he remembered this 
 trait in my nature. Jacques resembles me more 
 especially in that point, much more so than in the 
 various adventures, for the most part purely imagi- 
 nary, through which my brother makes me move 
 whilst endeavoring with the eloquence of a grate- 
 ful heart to depict the solicitude of an older for a 
 younger brother. Still, I will say and not return 
 to it again, there is one among all these adventures 
 which is rigorously true, the scene of the "jug." 
 
 We were so poor and wretched, our enterprises 
 were so unlucky that nobody thought of procur- 
 ing pleasures for us. The only enjoyments which 
 were permitted us, because they were within reach 
 of our almost empty purse, consisted in a few 
 excursions into the surrounding country, to Char- 
 pennes and the Tete-d'Or and into the woods of 
 La Pape.
 
 340 Alphonse Datidet. 
 
 These forests, which I have never seen again and 
 which I am told a line of railway has destroyed, 
 rose in terraces and showed their splendid green 
 tints upon the banks of the Rhone; they revealed 
 the beauties of meadows, waters and woods to us 
 little Southerners brought up under the burning 
 sun in fields that never are watered, but are ever 
 burned by the fierce sunshine. Alphonse and I 
 took long walks together and we imbibed from 
 these impressions of nature a love of the country 
 which both of us have preserved in equal strength. 
 
 On Sundays I accompanied my older brother to 
 Notre Dame de Fourvi^res. He had infected me 
 with a certain share of his religious fervor; he 
 dragged me to all sorts of pious ceremonies at the 
 church of the Jesuits and of the Capuchins, and 
 he urged me toward the doors of the monastery. 
 Our conversations related almost entirely to the 
 lives of the blessed, their mortifications and their 
 virtues whilst they were toiling up the steep roads 
 of the holy mountain. 
 
 We used to stop at the trays of the sellers of 
 pious objects, where ivory crucifixes, gold and 
 silver medals and chaplets displayed upon beds of 
 cotton were crowded together with scapularies, 
 prayer books and a hundred eccentric pamphlets, 
 the product of a sickly illuminism. 
 
 Along the fronts of the booths garlands of im- 
 mortelles and jet and bunches of holy candles 
 swung to and fro in the wind, striking against 
 walls covered with prints very coarsely colored. 
 These prints represented scenes from the New
 
 My Brother and I. 341 
 
 Testament, portraits of saints and mystical allegor- 
 ies, likewise a collection of all the fungi known, 
 whether poisonous or not ; a chart of all the pos- 
 sible accidents, such as burns, stings, poisonings, 
 which was finished up with a statement how to 
 remedy them ; then the " Mirror of the Soul filled 
 by Sin," a title which was expressed by the pic- 
 ture of a heart in the centre of which a devil was 
 seated upon a throne, a sceptre in his hand and a 
 lot of pigs at his feet. 
 
 We used to listen to mass when we arrived at 
 the chapel, from whose roof hung thousands of 
 votive objects of the most extraordinary kind, 
 grotesque pictures and legs and arms modelled 
 in white wax ; and then, quite overcome by ten- 
 der ecstasy, we went and seated ourselves on the 
 terrace whence the most imposing panorama 
 might be seen: the hundred steeples of Lyon; 
 Bellecour Place and its square overlooked by the 
 monumental portrait of Louis XIV by Coustou ; 
 the Saone unrolling its sinuous bends between the 
 fine quays, overlooked on one side by the heights 
 of Saint-Foy and on the other by the rock of the 
 Chartreux, the first buttress of the Croix- Rousse; 
 and then the teeming suburb with its high piled 
 mass of houses, their dark fronts pierced with a 
 thousand windows, inclosing the machines of the 
 weaving guild and yawning like so many crev- 
 ices opened down into the abyss of misery ; the 
 Rhone with its yellow flood which seemed to 
 hurry an entire city of punts, rafts and boats along 
 its swift stream as far as La Mulatiere, where it
 
 342 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 receives the Saone into its bed ; the tangled and 
 weather-beaten beams of the Morand bridge, the 
 pilons in the shape of obeHsks on the high portal 
 of the college, the black and heavy arches of the 
 Guillotiere bridge. Beyond the river lay enormous 
 plains, here all bare and there wooded, inhabited 
 and deserted, cut at this point and at that by the 
 solid mass of forts edged with cannon, or by the 
 long curtains of poplars above the green pathways ; 
 and finally at the very limits of the horizon, a chain 
 of little hills which act as fore-runners to the 
 higher mountains of the Dauphin^, whose snowy 
 crests, steeped in the golden vapors of the setting 
 sun, brighten the horizon with a zigzag line of 
 silver. 
 
 A few months after our arrival in Lyon, on the 
 advice of my eldest brother, who was just off to be- 
 gin his ecclesiastical study in the Allix seminary, 
 we were placed in the man^canterie of Saint-Pierre. 
 On condition that we would do the duty of choir 
 boys we were allowed to continue our classes in 
 Greek and Latin there. My poor father had not 
 found a more practical means than this to con- 
 tinue our studies without opening his purse. But 
 it was only time lost, for religious ceremonies 
 occupied all our waking hours and studies were 
 relegated to the second place. 
 
 We had all sorts of disastrous adventures there ; 
 that is the period of my life when I wept the most. 
 I vfas awkward beyond words ! I never was able 
 to learn to serve at the mass properly; one day 
 when I was assisting all alone I got so completely
 
 My Brother and I. 343 
 
 mixed up in the ceremony that I rang the Sanctus 
 at the Gospels and put all the faithful to flight. 
 
 Alphonse too had his own disasters : " One day 
 at mass whilst changing the place of the Gospels 
 the big book was so heavy that it pulled me over. 
 I fell my entire length on the steps of the altar. 
 The reading desk was broken and the service was 
 interrupted. It was during the Pentecost, What 
 a scandal that was ! " 
 
 The worst of it was that in the complete upset 
 of that strange sort of life my brother became a 
 terribly undisciplined little fellow. What must he 
 do one day, but conceive the idea of digging a 
 mine in the closets for the holy vestments and 
 pouring powder into it ! Terrible was the explo- 
 sion, and it was truly a miracle that no accident 
 occurred. 
 
 A little while after, our parents, having per- 
 ceived that we were not learning anything worth 
 while, decided to put us at college. We were pre- 
 sented to the proctor and after a short examination 
 my brother was admitted to the sixth, whilst I was 
 placed in the fifth form.
 
 344 AlpJionse Daudet. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 It may be, reader, that you think I linger over 
 these memories of our childhood ; nevertheless 
 you will have to resign yourself to a further march 
 across this melancholy domain with me, for it is 
 the only means by which you can understand in 
 what circumstances the literary vocation of my 
 brother and myself ripened. These circumstances 
 were unfavorable in every respect. We never 
 heard an allusion to things of art and literature, 
 politics, stories of the past, a thousand incidents 
 of our life. Business affairs and the plans which 
 they brought forth, along with the cares and 
 anxieties which they engendered, formed the 
 ordinary topics at our family meetings. 
 
 My mother kept to herself the impressions she 
 obtained from her reading, as if she did not dare 
 to avow to us the pleasure which she got from 
 them, the only pleasure in the midst of her trouble 
 which it was possible for her to enjoy. 
 
 So it was not the surroundings in which we 
 lived as children that determined our vocation ; 
 the only effects they could have would be to re- 
 buff any precocious and accidental manifestations. 
 But it is probable that the influence of these sur-
 
 My Brother and I. 345 
 
 foundings was attacked and overcome by the in- 
 fluence of a mysterious heritage : it is probable that 
 from some one of our grandparents, a Reynaud 
 or a Daudet, we inherit that thirst for intel- 
 lectual sensations, that necessity to express them 
 with the pen which is common to us both, and 
 it was from this source my brother received the 
 gift of observation which characterizes his talent, 
 that delicate sensibility and that art of writing he 
 possesses which give his pen the power of a brush. 
 Whence came the fertile treasure of which he had 
 complete possession the very day when for the 
 first time he performed the author's part? which 
 one of those from whom we descend possessed 
 that quality in the remote past? I do not know, 
 but what is undeniable is this, Alphonse Daudet 
 had those qualities, which no one will dream of 
 denying him, all of a sudden, at a single moment 
 and as if by some happy chance he had found 
 them among the frills and laces of his cradle. 
 
 Developed later by incessant and grinding 
 labor, they nevertheless exist in his youthful 
 work, with less grandeur undoubtedly than we 
 see in those of his manhood, but ever there; 
 they even exist in the only romance from his 
 hand which has never been published — he was 
 fifteen years old when he wrote it — to which I 
 shall return presently. 
 
 College life did not open to us any vistas more 
 smiling than those which had shut in our horizon 
 up to that day : " What struck me at first on my 
 arrival at college," wrote le Petit Chose, " was the
 
 346 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 fact that I alone was there in a blouse. At Lyon 
 the sons of rich people do not wear a blouse, only 
 the street children, the gones wear them, as the 
 word was used. But I, yes, I had one, a little 
 blouse with checks that belonged to the days of 
 the factory; I wore a blouse, I had the look of a 
 gone." 
 
 That was indeed our first sensation and our first 
 torture when we entered the wide courtyard of 
 the college exactly in the same guise as we 
 arrived from our Southern home, being clad as 
 children of our own age and condition were used 
 to being dressed in Nimes, a town somewhat back- 
 ward in such matters. At once we were classified 
 by our fellow pupils with those poor wretches 
 whose parents sweat blood to pay the cost of 
 their studies. The more elegantly clad among 
 our comrades disdained to have anything to do 
 with the new arrivals and affected airs of haughti- 
 ness or protection with us. A little later we were 
 given less humiliating clothes, but the effect had 
 been produced and the impression remained. 
 My brother overcame it victoriously by gaining 
 the first places in his classes at the very begin- 
 ning ; from that moment on he was one of the 
 most brilliant students at the college. 
 
 But a queer sort of student, I can promise you ! 
 In a very few months the " school of the hedges " 
 had become a regular habit with him. During 
 the week we had ten classes, but it was very sel- 
 dom that he did not miss five or six and this 
 lasted for many years. He became so bad that
 
 My Brother and I. 347 
 
 he did not appear at college save on composition 
 days, a fact, however, which did not prevent him 
 from being always classed among the first, parti- 
 cularly in exact proportion with his advance toward 
 the higher studies. 
 
 His intelligence astonished his professors. 
 From the third form on he treated subjects in 
 French composition in verse. Indeed one day 
 he was placed " hors concours " with special 
 praises. His professor having asked him for an 
 apology for Homer, at the end of two hours he 
 gave him an ode which constituted a real event. 
 Here is the conclusion — I have forgotten the 
 rest : 
 
 Et dans quatre mille ans, 
 Au milieu des tombeaux et des peuples croulants, 
 Comme un sphinx endormi, colosse fait de pierre, 
 Tu pourras soulever lentement ta paupi^re, 
 Regarder le chaos et dire avec orgueil : 
 Au vieil Hom^re il faut un monde pour cercueil ! 
 
 The following year he tried his hand at another 
 sort: 
 
 Rito, beau capitaine au service du doge, 
 ttait un gai luron, I'oeil bleu, le poil blondin. 
 Qui lorgnait gentiment una belle en sa loge, 
 Et qui portait toujours des gants en peau de daim. 
 Mainte fois, il avait tird I'dpde, et meme 
 II avait fait, dit-on, gras pendant le car^me. 
 Dieu salt si les maris le redoutaient ! Rito 
 Leur rendait fort souvent visite incognito. 
 
 I am inclined to think that this poem, the 
 beginning of which was written in shorthand dur-
 
 348 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 ing the class hour, in order to conceal it from his 
 professor, was never finished. 
 
 I have never yet been able to explain to my- 
 self how it was, notwithstanding the disorderly 
 existence which my brother continued at that 
 time, that he was able to climb with so much glory 
 the steps of his studies. 
 
 At frequent intervals a printed warning signed 
 by the censor was left with our house-porter to the 
 effect that M. Vincent Daudet was notified 
 that the pupil Alphonse Daudet, his son, had not 
 appeared at his class on such and such a day. 
 Thanks to my precautions these were always faith- 
 fully remitted to me, and I overcame their evil 
 effects by very crafty excuses which I boldly signed 
 with the name of our father! 
 
 And what a lot of those excuses did I not com- 
 pose at that time, in order to let my brother escape 
 well-merited scoldings ! I did indeed attempt to 
 make up for such scoldings by bringing forward 
 timid counsels, which Alphonse always met by a 
 promise never to do it again. 
 
 The trouble was that he always did do it again. 
 He was caught in the trammels of a life entirely 
 outside the family and school, as it were without 
 watchers or bounds. 
 
 There were boating parties on the Saone, or 
 flights across the green fields which surround 
 Lyon, stops at taverns — what more can I say? 
 — a thousand adventures, fitted to reveal his 
 extraordinary precocity. Without knowing it 
 himself, he was gathering there impressions that
 
 My Brother and I. 349 
 
 would never be effaced and with whose aid he 
 should write out accounts of so vivid a sort later 
 in life. 
 
 He came back to us worn out and pale, his 
 features all drawn, drunk with weariness and the 
 country air, his eyes filled with visions of waters 
 whirling and sliding through a morning fog. As 
 he always came in too late, I was always anxiously 
 watching the door in order to forestall his return 
 and open it without noise, and then help him to 
 arrange an explanation for our parents. As soon 
 as he appeared I would let him know in a whisper 
 what effect his absence had appeared to make on 
 them ; so he knew whether they were angry or 
 his absence had passed unnoticed ; thus we hastily 
 improvised some acceptable excuse according to 
 the gravity of the case. 
 
 One day he came in all feverish, staggering 
 and with a troubled look, for they had made him 
 drink absinthe. Greatly terrified, I pushed him 
 up against the wall of the vestibule and looking 
 him straight in the eye I said to him : 
 
 " Look out now, papa is in there ! " 
 
 He made an effort, succeeded in gaining com- 
 mand of himself and appeared as usual before our 
 parents. In order to justify his tardy return, he 
 alleged that he had been kept at the college by 
 the visit of an inspector-general of universities. 
 
 "But, my dear child," said my mother, "you 
 must be dying of hunger! " 
 
 My father was touched and observed that they 
 made boys work too hard. Meantime in a jiffy we
 
 350 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 had arranged a plate and cover on the corner of 
 the table, and though he was sick at his stomach 
 and could hardly hold up his head, the wretched 
 boy had to pretend to have a voracious appetite 
 and eat and drink everything that was given him, 
 whilst our parents, who were seated by his side, 
 looked upon him with an air of pity and spied out 
 every movement with the deepest solicitude. 
 
 Hardly thirteen years old and thrown into such 
 a life with children of his own age, whose influ- 
 ence and example led him on, how was it that he 
 did not leave right there his fine and intellectual 
 qualities, the vivacity of his intelligence, the fresh- 
 ness of his soul, the delicacy of his mind and his 
 native uprightness, that flower of his honor? In 
 a similar case almost any other would have been 
 lost. But in his case the trial, which, to be sure, I 
 would never advise any father to place before his 
 son, has furnished results contrary to those which 
 it was logical that he should fear. 
 
 The same phenomenon occurred again some 
 years later when, free and without restrictions 
 in the streets of Paris at the time that he was 
 only seventeen, he marched unharmed through 
 all the caves of Bohemia among the lazy and 
 enervated and vagabonds of every sort, whose 
 only sign of activity consists in adding to their 
 own number, in order that they may find in others 
 a justification for their own shame — fit at most 
 to calumniate a conscientious and fruitful talent 
 and to revenge themselves upon him by low abuse 
 for the humiliations which are the result of an
 
 My Brother and I. 351 
 
 incurable necessity to wallow in the most abject 
 laziness. 
 
 Such experiences have in two cases given my 
 brother the same result. Nothing of that which is 
 good in him remains sticking to the briers on those 
 perilous paths which he traversed. It is even far 
 from bold to affirm that his talent has profited in a 
 large measure by the discoveries and temptations 
 that met him there. They hastened the ripening 
 of his mind, and far from blunting him, on the 
 contrary refined him and made him more sensi- 
 tive, until they gave him the nervous reactibility 
 of a violin string. 
 
 Whilst turning over in his mind these years full 
 of desperate wretchedness, dangerous escapades 
 and unwholesome distractions, which reappear to 
 him as in a mirror across the lapse of time, it came 
 to him to place like an epitaph on the title-page 
 of one of his books the famous phrase left by 
 Mme. de Sevigne : "One of my worst troubles 
 consists of the memories which places fix in my 
 mind ; I am affected by them beyond all sense 
 and reason." It is with these words that he came 
 to express the painful impressionability, through 
 which, unwillingly, he preserved the slightest 
 episodes of his childhood and youth deeply en- 
 graved on his mind — the most sorrowful ones 
 even more living than the others ! 
 
 Although he passed in triumph through so 
 many dangerous experiences, the reader would 
 be in error if he supposed that the episodes of 
 his harum-scarum life left me without apprehen-
 
 352 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 sion. Along with the anguish of waiting which 
 overcame me when he did not come home at the 
 time the classes of the college were discharged, 
 there was always the fear of accident. He was 
 so brave and disdainful of danger ; and then his 
 short-sightedness greatly increased the risk ! 
 
 More than once he succeeded in getting his 
 boat under the wheels of a steamer, and since, 
 when he came back from this adventure, I was 
 the confidant of his sensations at the time, when 
 in the least behind the hour I began to see him 
 being tossed into that cursed Saone, whose stream 
 as it passes Lyon has quite as much movement as 
 a populous street. 
 
 And then there was also the fear of carriages 
 and of blows received in some quarrel. Oh, 
 what sorrowful hours I passed ! But when I 
 perceived him coming I forgot everything; as 
 long as our parents could be kept in ignorance, 
 my only thought was the happiness of having 
 him back again safe and sound. I did not even 
 have courage enough to scold him. Our exist- 
 ence was so terribly monotonous that I under- 
 stood why he sought distractions outside. 
 
 True it is that sometimes he turned to veritable 
 monkey-tricks. Among our comrades was a boy 
 of good education but somewhat weak character 
 who allowed himself to be dragged like him into 
 adventures such as I am about to tell. He was 
 the son of a well-placed lawyer of Lyon. He 
 was of a sympathetic nature to all of us and since 
 that time has made his way courageously through
 
 My Brother and I. 353 
 
 the world without allowing the memory of the 
 miseries to which he was victim when a child to 
 leave any bitterness in his heart. But at that time 
 his figure, that had shot up to uncommon height, 
 his long nose and round, staring eyes, a defective 
 pronunciation and his natural naifvete made him 
 the butt for the pitiless raillery of those whose 
 comrade he had become. 
 
 A party to all their tricks, it was seldom that he 
 alone did not bear the responsibility. After some 
 escapade which was too noisy for an echo to fail 
 to reach the parents, when it was necessary to find 
 a scapegoat, it was he whom they accused, or it 
 is better to say, who unconsciously and without 
 intending to, accused himself. And when circum- 
 stances seemed to prove all the others innocent, 
 they always turned to his detriment; when all 
 escaped, he alone allowed himself to be caught. 
 
 Later on it grew far worse. His comrades 
 organized a veritable conspiracy against his father 
 and thought it vastly funny to have him as an ac- 
 complice. Most decidedly that age is absolutely 
 without pity! One morning the highly honor- 
 able attorney perceived the arrival in his kitchen, 
 which was placed on the same floor with his 
 study, of a long procession of little cook-shop 
 boys, each one bringing a vol-au-vent. Some of 
 them came from the neighborhood and others 
 from distant parts of the town. They jostled each 
 other on the stairs, pushed and reviled each other, 
 each greatly surprised at finding so many others 
 present. The cook received the first vol-au-vent, 
 
 21
 
 354 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 though she herself had not ordered it, and then a 
 second and a third ; but when this flood of white 
 aprons and caps set in she went to find her master. 
 The tableau may be imagined. 
 
 At that time we had left the apartment in Lafont 
 Street because of the cost of the rent. We were 
 living in the second story of an old house in the 
 Pas-fitroit Street, which comes out upon the quays 
 of the Rhdne ; it is a badly paved street along 
 which the college raises its blackened walls, and 
 these kept all the light away from us. 
 
 Our stairs were dark and damp. Every time 
 the river rose the water came up into our street 
 and reached at least a meter up our stairs, so that 
 for three days at a time we were not able to leave 
 the house except by means of a boat. On its 
 lower face the house showed the traces of many 
 inundations; we had two floods in three years. 
 The big front door was covered with dank spots ; 
 the alley was full of greenish tones from mildew 
 and the plastering was tumbling everywhere. 
 
 That was just the spot arranged for poor people 
 and such wretched beings as we were at the time. 
 The apartment was a decent, spacious and com- 
 modious one, but the proprietor leased it at a low 
 price because of the lamentable appearance of the 
 property. 
 
 We were living there when the coup d'etat was 
 made. We were too young to foresee all the con- 
 sequences of such an event as that, and judged it 
 only from the point of view of such amusements 
 as it might bring us in its wake. Crowds gathered
 
 My Brother and I. 355 
 
 round the white placards containing proclamations 
 and the decrees of the Prince-President. As a 
 usual thing the mob was very sober in its utter- 
 ances, for the times were not very healthy for 
 critical remarks. Marshal de Castellane, who was 
 in command of Lyon, had put the city in a state 
 of siege. Many arrests had been made and troops 
 were encamped before big fires in the streets all 
 along the quays of the Rhone. At the entrances 
 to the bridges were cannon deployed for work, 
 for in that direction an army of "hungry ones" 
 was expected to arrive from the Swiss border, and 
 steps were taken to meet them. 
 
 The season was very severe ; when night fell 
 the soldiers were shivering round their fires, and 
 since, after all, the population of Lyon considered 
 them as defenders against dangers which were said 
 to threaten, they were treated as friends and the 
 people beat their brains for something which 
 might add a little pleasure to their ordinary diet. 
 To please a detachment of chasseurs de Vincennes 
 which was encamped in front of the gateway of 
 the college, a fine leg of mutton with string beans 
 was prepared expressly for their delectation in our 
 kitchen, and Alphonse and I sallied proudly forth 
 to bring it to them, along with several bottles of 
 wine, all of which was accepted with the most joy- 
 ful gratitude. 
 
 But the coup d'etat was a sore disappointment 
 to our father, for up to that moment he had cher- 
 ished the hope of a speedy return of the king. 
 
 Called to Paris by business a little while before,
 
 356 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 he had been presented to the chiefs of the Royal- 
 ist party. One of them, invested with due powers 
 by " Monseigneur," had solemnly inscribed in his 
 note-book the name of Vincent Daudet and those 
 of his sons, promising him in reward for his life- 
 long fidelity places for him and for them, when 
 the hour for the legal and loyal revenges should 
 sound. 
 
 A little while afterwards a memento reached us 
 from Frohsdorf, namely a seal in red wax com- 
 posed of three flowers de luce on a sheet of white 
 paper, with these words round the circumference: 
 •' Fides, spes," and underneath, this simple line of 
 mention : " Presented to M. Daudet. Henri." 
 
 It was necessary now to give up all hopes of the 
 brilliant future which so many promises allowed 
 us to expect. 
 
 One morning we found in the newspaper the 
 facsimile of a protestation from the Comte de 
 Chambord which began thus : " Frenchmen, 
 they 're deceiving you ! " With a quivering voice 
 I read it aloud to my father who was still in bed. 
 My mother wept a few tears — barren tears ! We 
 had crossed the threshold of the Empire.
 
 My Brother aiid I. 357 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 The memory of some of our most cruel mis- 
 fortunes is associated with that apartment in 
 Pas-fitroit Street. After the deception we ex- 
 perienced, which I have just related, came a 
 long sickness of my father, then the departure 
 of Annette, an excellent maid-servant, who had 
 been in our service several years and adored us. 
 She knew all the secrets of our distress and 
 labored with the courage of a heroine to make it 
 less bitter to us by economizing our outlay. She 
 had followed us to Lyon in order not to part 
 from us; and although the climate was murderous 
 to her health, she remained faithful to us. Dur- 
 ing his sickness my father conceived a hatred for 
 her and it was necessary to send her away. When 
 he got well he deplored his unjust attitude and 
 v/ished to bring her back; but she had seen her 
 country's brilliant sky once more and would 
 never return. 
 
 Two years before, finding that I was doing 
 nothing of any account on the school bench, and 
 tormented by I know not what yearning for inde- 
 pendence and emancipation, urged, moreover, by 
 a powerful desire for some paying labor, I had
 
 358 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 requested permission to leave college to study 
 business and obtained my parents' consent. My 
 father, needing some one to help him, kept me 
 with him ; so I passed my apprenticeship in busi- 
 ness under his direction. 
 
 Continuing to fabricate scarfs, he had estab- 
 lished a salesroom in the largest chamber that our 
 apartment afforded. I can see it still, that melan- 
 choly shop where I lived so sad a life for many 
 long months ! To the right and left were long 
 planks on trestles ; for a desk there was an open 
 board let into the wall under the window; and 
 hung from the ceiling were gigantic balances on 
 which silk was weighed. Along the walls were 
 four chairs and stands in white wood, where the 
 scarf stuffs were ranged ; in one corner stood an 
 old iron-bound coffer studded with enormous nail- 
 heads, a survival from the splendors of the past — 
 that was all of this somewhat primitive instal- 
 lation ! 
 
 How many hours I have passed in that room, 
 folding up the merchandise, writing letters, mak- 
 ing out bills and doing up parcels ! We labored 
 hard, my father and I, just like two diggers of the 
 soil. With the exception of lading our boxes on 
 our own shoulders, I hardly see what there was 
 that we left to the porter who helped us. Still, 
 neither one nor the other dreamt of complaining; 
 we were well paid when a client appeared. 
 
 Clients would not have been lacking, for the 
 output of our house had the reputation of being 
 beautiful, "carefully made and cheap;" but what
 
 My Brother and I. 359 
 
 was lacking was money, capital, the possibility of 
 supplying the advances which our business de- 
 manded. At any moment it was necessary to cut 
 short fabrication when it was absolutely necessary 
 to increase it. At other times, when with great 
 effort we had filled the shelves with merchandise, 
 sales suddenly stopped, owing to the prevalence 
 of some accidental crisis, and we were left with- 
 out any receipts, after having exhausted all our 
 resources in advance payments. 
 
 Oh, what burning cares in that march which 
 staggered on between failure and protested notes ! 
 How can I relate the anguish of the days when 
 notes fell due.-* They always came too soon. 
 The little note-book in which the bills to pay 
 were inscribed recalled them ever to our minds. 
 With beating hearts we saw the day approach 
 and reckoned on some buyer, who never came, 
 in order to meet it. Often we were taken unex- 
 pectedly. Then we threw two or three hundred 
 pieces into a box in a hurry. A porter took the 
 box on his shoulder and off we went to merchants 
 whose entire business it was to take advantage of 
 the difficulties of the silk-weavers when at bay. 
 Shame on one's brow and anger in one's heart, 
 enough was sold to them at the lowest price in 
 order to meet the note falling due that day. 
 People scarcely become wealthy at a business of 
 that sort. 
 
 After a multitude of ruinous operations had 
 opened the gulf into which we were about to fall, 
 the protests arrived — protests and their humili-
 
 360 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 ating sequels. One morning — I can remember 
 it as if it were yesterday — about seven o'clock, 
 three men, obsequious in their manner, entered 
 the shop. It was a bailiff and his assistants. 
 They came to make a seizure in consequence of 
 a verdict pronounced by the tribunal of commerce 
 because of an unpaid draft. 
 
 My mother, who was ill that day, was still in 
 bed ; my father was shaving himself before the 
 window in the shop; I was writing a letter and 
 my brother was putting a last touch to his lessons 
 before leaving for the college. One may imagine, 
 without the necessity of describing it, what an 
 effect the apparition of the men of law in our 
 home, so peaceful in its monotony, produced ! 
 
 On that day for the first time I had a manly 
 idea of taking the initiative. Whilst my poor 
 father was parleying, very pale, half his face 
 covered with soap and his razor in his hand, 
 hoping to defend his threatened hearth, I flew off 
 like an arrow to look for help. 
 
 Among the merchants of Lyons with whom we 
 had had business connections was one who had 
 known us during more fortunate years. Our mis- 
 fortunes had not destroyed his sympathy for us. 
 All of a sudden his name presented itself to my 
 memory. Half out of my mind, I reached his 
 house. 
 
 ''* Oh, sir, " said I to him, " do come to our house 
 right away ! " 
 
 I was so upset and so pale that he did not ask 
 any questions, but took his hat and followed me.
 
 My Brother and I. 361 
 
 On the way I related to him what had happened 
 to us and told him what I hoped he could do for 
 us. He was the friend of our creditor and his 
 intervention might save us. 
 
 When he reached the house he sent the bailiffs 
 packing; to the great despair of my mother, they 
 had begun to take an inventory of our furniture; 
 then he had a talk with my father. At the end 
 of an hour we got an assurance that further action 
 should not be taken against us, but our creditor 
 would consent to give us time to clear ourselves 
 of the debt. 
 
 The kind man to whom I had appealed ren- 
 dered us the service with a discreet simplicity 
 which greatly increased its value. He kept our 
 secret absolutely, even as regards his own family. 
 Many years after, in January of 1871, whilst pass^ 
 ing through Geneva on the day after the armistice 
 was signed, and at the time that the army of the 
 East had just retired into Switzerland, I met in 
 the streets of that town a poor little soldier of the 
 line, hollow-cheeked, ragged and dragging his 
 bruised feet with difficulty one after the other. 
 He recognized me and calling to me gave me 
 his name. It was the son of our savior. I took 
 him to my hotel and lavished on him all the care 
 which his condition of health demanded; but the 
 dear boy had no idea that, in addition to the 
 pleasure of helping this French soldier, there was 
 for me the further satisfaction of paying a sacred 
 debt. 
 
 Alas, would that our misfortunes had been
 
 362 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 limited to such touching trials as these! But 
 they went on growing more complicated and in- 
 volved, so that the chapter may be called actually 
 endless. 
 
 After the departure of the good, kind Annette, 
 who had been sent back to the South as I have 
 related, her place was taken by a solid, hard- 
 working woman from Auvergne. But little as the 
 expense was which she involved, it was necessary 
 to renounce even that. Then a woman was hired 
 to do the coarse work of the household and our 
 dear mother employed her white hands in the 
 kitchen and installed me as purveyor. 
 
 Every morning, after a short talk with her, I 
 started off for the marketing, a basket under my 
 arm. I was somewhat humiliated by my part and 
 attempted to put on the airs of a little rich boy 
 who was playing at being a servant; and it seemed 
 that I knew how to buy very well. Before I left 
 I went to the iron-bound coffer to get the money. 
 
 Ah, that old coffer, I see it ever in my mind ! 
 It might have contained in its depth and width a 
 whole fortune; but, through the acrid irony of 
 fate, it was always empty. The key remained in 
 the lock; they even neglected to shut the door. 
 On one of the boards within my father placed 
 from time to time a pile of silver pieces. I took 
 money thence, full of perplexity ; a cold sweat 
 bathed my forehead just in proportion as this 
 slender pile grew less and less. 
 
 One day the last piece in the last pile was gone 
 and its place remained empty. It was necessary
 
 My Brother and I. 363 
 
 to turn to any expedient possible, to the pawn- 
 shop for example, whither I carried in suc- 
 cession every piece of old silver, the jewels 
 belonging to my mother and everything which 
 we had saved from former shipwrecks. At my 
 first visit to an official at the government pawn- 
 shop I had interested him in our misfortunes by 
 proudly insisting, contrary to the truth, that our 
 dilemma was only for the moment. In that way 
 I obtained permission to come to him through a 
 door apart and wait for him in a little room, 
 without being compelled to mingle with the mob 
 of poverty-stricken wretches that pushed about his 
 wicket. 
 
 Oh, days of blackest misery, what wrinkles you 
 have carved in our memories! What a preco- 
 cious ripening did you not cause our souls to 
 undergo ! Yes, indeed, we became men at a very 
 early hour, through having lived with adversity. 
 Much less would have produced the same result! 
 The soul of a child steels itself quickly under 
 such harsh trials. 
 
 But experience which is bought at that price, by 
 the sacrifice of the illusions and joys of youth, is 
 so painful that I would wish no one to gain it so 
 dearly. The anxieties and tears of those whom 
 you love, the despairing pursuit after money, pro- 
 found and hidden distress, shame at urgent beg- 
 ging prayers, early morning visits to the priest of 
 the parish, the first and only person to whom one 
 dares tell everything, the anguish of hours of 
 v/aiting which follow demands, the answers which
 
 364 Alphonsc Daudet. 
 
 never come, the uncertainty as to the morrow, 
 the whole horizon without a bright point — reader, 
 God keep you from such trials ! 
 
 Owing to this persistency of bad luck, the con- 
 clusion was come to that there was no place for 
 me in my father's business and that it would be 
 prudent to leave me free to gain my livelihood in 
 some other direction. So I was permitted to look 
 out for work and I found a place at first in the 
 government pawnshop of Lyons. 
 
 The place owed us that at least! As a super- 
 numerary I earned the bread which I ate at my 
 parent's house to the extent of three francs a day. 
 Seated between two appraisers behind a wicket, I 
 made investigations under their orders. Ah, 
 how many sad looks and long faces, how many 
 poor, thin hands holding out a little parcel of 
 wretched clothes in shame, have I not seen 
 through the narrow square opening of the grille 
 which separated us from the public! 
 
 The evening of the day on which, for the first 
 time, I was a spectator of this heart-rending 
 scene, I said to our mother: 
 
 "There are people more unhappy than we are." 
 
 At the end of a few months I left the pawnshop, 
 sick, as it were poisoned by the pestiferous air 
 I had inhaled between walls impregnated with 
 all the unwholesome odors which disengage them- 
 selves from these pledged objects. A more lucra- 
 tive place had been offered me — the position 
 as a clerk with Descours, a man who let car- 
 riages and wagons. As a beginning they put me
 
 My Brother a7id I. 365 
 
 to work on the carrier's letters. I have filled up 
 hundreds of those leaflets bearing the Imperial 
 stamp, at the head of which can be read, printed 
 by lithography, the old formula : " Under the 
 hand of God and in the charge of So-and-So, 
 public carrier. ..." 
 
 My work was hard ; it kept me at the office, 
 very often, to a very late hour of the night. But 
 at any rate the remuneration was proportionate 
 with the work and the surroundings were more 
 human, healthier, less sorrowful than those at the 
 pawnshop. 
 
 M. Descours was an excellent man and showed 
 me kindness; whilst my comrades treated me as 
 a person superior to my condition, who had been 
 accidentally thrown amongst them, but was des- 
 tined to leave them some day in order to rise 
 higher.
 
 366 Alphonse Daudet, 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 Mv brother v/as then fifteen years old and was 
 just finishing his "humanities," whilst I was 
 eighteen. All the spare time which his studies 
 allowed him, for his life was at once full of excite- 
 ment and work, and all that my office work per- 
 mitted me were absorbed by our literary dreams. 
 
 Neither one nor the other of us had stated in 
 so many words that we proposed to give our life 
 to letters. But it is worthy of note that the 
 more our circumstances persisted in separating us 
 from that career into which we afterward em- 
 barked, the more a mysterious call made itself 
 heard in us and prepared us for it. 
 
 It dated from as early a moment as our arrival 
 in Pas-Etroit Street. On the same floor with 
 us there lived with his parents a certain young 
 man about our own age; we knew him at the 
 college before we were aware he was our neighbor. 
 When we had become close friends, he confessed 
 to us that he was a poet ; already he had composed 
 several hundred verses and he made a collection 
 of poems with the greatest fastidiousness, copy- 
 ing them in fine, round script into an album with 
 black rnorocco covers and broad gold edges.
 
 My Brother and I. 367 
 
 Since he was brought up upon the Oricntales and 
 the Odes ct Ballades, his productions consisted of 
 scarcely anything better than more or less suc- 
 cessful imitations of Victor Hugo. But our ad- 
 miration could not be killed by such a slight thing 
 as that; we knew his verses by heart and spouted 
 them in chorus with him. 
 
 En avant ! en avant ! Ddja la blonde aurore 
 A, de ses doigts rostfs, entr'ouvert I'Orient! 
 En avant I en avant ! Le ciel qui se colore 
 De ses premiers rayons ddjh jaunit et dore 
 Le faite ardoisd du convent. 
 
 My brother had already made verses and, 
 encouraged by his neighbor's example, he con- 
 tinued to make them. You may still read some 
 ot them dating from that period in Lcs Aniou- 
 rcuses, in which, three years later, he thought 
 them worthy to figure. I fell into the same vein 
 and beneath the sway of my mystical aspirations 
 which, for a long time, left a deep trace in my 
 spirit, I sketched a poem on religion. The soli- 
 tary stanza which I wrote is given complete in Le 
 Petit Chose and it is so delightfully made fun of 
 there that I have won the right to talk of it with- 
 out laughing. 
 
 Then, after having devoured the poems of 
 Ossian and the tragedies of Ducis in imitation of 
 Shakespeare, I also desired to write tragedy. I 
 arranged a plot. It began in a forest of Corn- 
 wall, the evening before a combat. My brother 
 lent me the first line: 
 Du sang I Partout du sang ! Chaque arbre, chaque feuille . . ■
 
 368 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 But I was never able to supply the second line 
 and my tragedy stayed where it was. I dropped 
 verses and turned to prose. Alphonse turned 
 the same way, but without abandoning rhymes. 
 It was at that time he composed La Vierge a la 
 Creche : — 
 
 Dans ses langes blancs, fraichement cousus, 
 
 La Vierge bercait son enfant Jdsus ; 
 
 Lui gazouillait comme un nid de mdsanges; 
 
 Elle le bercait et chantait tout bas 
 
 Ce que nous chantons k ces petits anges ! 
 
 Mais I'enfant J^sus ne s'endormait pas ! 
 
 Estonnd, ravi de ce qu'il entend, 
 
 II fit dans sa crfeche, et s'en va chantant; 
 
 Comme un saint Idvite et comme un choriste 
 
 II bat la mesure avec ses deux bras, 
 
 Et la Sainte Vierge est triste, bien triste, 
 
 De voir son J^sus qui ne s'endort pas. 
 
 To the same period belongs, moreover, Les 
 Petits Enfants : 
 
 Enfants d'un jour, 6 nouveau-nds! 
 Petites bouches, petits nez, 
 Petites levres demi-closes, 
 
 Membres tremblants, 
 
 Si frais, si blancs, 
 Si roses ! 
 
 Enfants d'un jour, 6 nouveau-n^s ! 
 Pour le bonheur que vous donnez 
 A vous voir dormir dans vos langes, 
 
 Espoir des nids, 
 
 Soyez bdnis, 
 Chers anges !
 
 My Brother and I. 369 
 
 Pour tout ce que vous gazouillez 
 
 Soyez b^nis, bais^s, choy^s. 
 
 Gais rossignols, blanches fauvettes, 
 
 Que d'amoureux 
 
 Et que d'heureux 
 Vous faites ! 
 
 That is the way my brother made his prelude to 
 the vast number of pages written, later, amid the 
 tumult of those ardent battles in which he was 
 engaged for life and for glory, all in the thick of 
 Paris and in the full tide of modernity. 
 
 Things of this sort occurred to him on his re- 
 turn from a trip in his canoe, or coming out of his 
 classroom, or else after some feverish evening in 
 a room hired in secret along with some of his 
 comrades in order to practise at Lyon their 
 apprenticeship to the Quartier Latin of Paris. 
 
 To the renown of their author, the verses have 
 survived the period which caused them to appear; 
 but where are those who, along with me, were 
 the first to hear them read ? Whither have they 
 flown, those companions of our youthful years, 
 those witnesses to the upspringing of a poet's 
 soul and the unloosing of our budding passions, 
 over-excited by the precocious and unhealthy 
 labor of our youthful imaginations, driven toward 
 the most flattering ideals ? We have found some 
 of them again ; but the others, are they dead .-' 
 are they living.? And if they are alive, have 
 they preserved the recollection of our fantastic 
 preparations for the accomplishment of the solemn 
 duties of life.'' 
 
 24
 
 \ 
 
 370 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 Prior to this flight toward literature, that taste 
 for books which we had whilst still children, just 
 as our mother before us, had developed itself with 
 a singular power within us. 
 
 At the old factory, coincident with the first 
 dawning of his intelligence, my brother never 
 closed his Robinson Crusoe except to revive in 
 his games the adventurous epic of his hero; recol- 
 lections of a Swiss Family Robinso7i, read and 
 re-read again and again, were also inspiration for 
 our im.aginations. Then a strip of turf became a 
 desert island, the peaches and figs against the 
 wall were transformed into guavas and bananas 
 and our dog Lotan became a famished and blood- 
 thirsty lion. All the books we read were turned 
 into action and our minds became accustomed to 
 absorb and retain everything. And when we be- 
 gan to write we did not stop reading, but quite the 
 contrary. Only we passed from Le College In- 
 cendi^ and Petits Bearnais and the Journal des 
 Enfants to Han d Islande and Les My stores de 
 Paris and Les Burgraves. 
 
 At that time, within the buildings belonging 
 to the college on the Quay de Retz was an old 
 bookseller named Gaspet, who lived at the ex- 
 tremity of a narrow shop. Long hours were 
 passed in his place, standing before the shelves 
 crammed with all sorts of worn and dusty vol- 
 umes. He had books of every period, ancient and 
 modern, good and bad, the old classics, the liber- 
 tine authors of the eighteenth century, novels, 
 medical and scientific books; we turned every-
 
 My Brother and I. 371 
 
 thing over, standing up and in a hurry, quickly 
 whisking over the leaves to ferret out the interest- 
 ing passages. 
 
 Then we made a few purchases and exchanges 
 — quite a bookseller's business — by means of 
 which we got by turns Buffon, Ariosto, Shake- 
 speare, Boccaccio, Piron, the Abbe de Chaulieu, 
 Vicomte d'Arlincourt, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, 
 Pigault-Lebrun — works of the greatest variety 
 that were bolted rather than read in pursuit of 
 our boyish curiosity, which was eager to penetrate 
 the secrets our studies had not revealed to us. 
 
 Later, when my brother had left me, as I shall 
 soon relate, I continued to read and buy books 
 with the savings laboriously brought together — 
 works of modern authors in editions illustrated by 
 Bertall, Riou, Janet-Lange, Philippoteaux, Gus- 
 tave Dor^, who was a master at twenty years, and 
 a hundred others. That is the way I learned to 
 know Balzac, George Sand, Frederic Soulid, 
 Eugene Sue, L6on Gozlan, M6ry, Charles de 
 Bernard, Alphonse Karr, Henry Murger. Then 
 came the time of Le Journal pour Tons. That 
 opened the English novels to me — Dickens and 
 Thackeray, whom my brother was to know later 
 in Paris, along with Champfleury, who initiated 
 me into the methods of realism, a far from modest 
 forerunner of naturalism and a not less noisy one. 
 
 And finally through the Revue des Deux Maudes 
 and the Revue de Paris, which I found in the 
 reading-room, I became acquainted with Octave 
 Feuillet, Amedee Achard, Louis Ulbach and the
 
 372 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 master Gustave Flaubert whilst at the same 
 time in the midst of indecisions and gropings 
 my literary ideas were fixed by Sainte-Beuve, 
 Gustave Planche, Armand de Pontmartin, Fioren- 
 tino and Jules Janin. 
 
 As a final touch to this unconscious prepara- 
 tion for our entrance into the field of letters the 
 biographies by Eugene de Mirecourt, the success 
 of which was so great in the provinces, intro- 
 duced me to the world of writers ; despite the fact 
 that they contained much that was untrue and 
 calumnious, they filled my mind with a thousand 
 characteristics which familiarized me with the 
 personalities of those men whose works we had 
 admired. 
 
 What a lot we did read in those distant years! 
 Of an evening, when everything was quiet about 
 us, a lamp, placed near the bed which we occupied 
 in brotherly union, lit up our long night watches. 
 The family thought we were asleep; and from 
 her distant bed-chamber our mother would call 
 to us again and again in order to make certain 
 that our light was quenched. But we took good 
 care not to answer; we held our breath and 
 turned the leaves noiselessly and, thanks to our 
 precautions, we plunged freely into long conver- 
 sations in place of sleep, talks which stimulated, 
 little by little, the fertility of our minds. 
 
 My father's political connections had opened to 
 us the editorial ofifice of the Gazette de Lyon. 
 This newspaper, consecrated to the defence of the 
 legitimacy of the Bourbons, was managed by
 
 My Bj^oiker and I. 373 
 
 Theodore Mayery, a journalist with no great 
 intellectual culture, but of a forcible and acrid 
 temperament. He wrote in a tumultuous, tor- 
 mented, bellowing style. His writing being 
 filled with slag and savage as his own soul, his 
 articles were of the hurrah-boy sort, but full of 
 new vistas and striking from their uncommon 
 originality. 
 
 Under his orders stood Paul Beurtheret, a noisy 
 and kind-hearted fellow from the Franche-Comt^, 
 who was as cultivated a literary man as Mayery 
 was lacking in that particular; under a broad 
 joviality of a fine sort he concealed a sensitive 
 nature, an honest heart, a proud independence 
 and an energetic sincerity in his convictions. 
 
 Called to the management of the France Centrale 
 at Blois, Paul Beurtheret came, later, to Paris, 
 drawn thither by Villemessant, who employed 
 him as secretary in the editorship of the Figaro. 
 But his taste for a free and independent life could 
 not accommodate itself to the needs of Parisian 
 journalism and the demands of an enslaving trade. 
 He was taken with home-sickness for his prov- 
 ince. He left and went to Tours to establish the 
 Union Lib^rale, one of the most brilliant organs 
 of the opposition toward the end of the empire. 
 In that city he was killed during the war on the 
 day the Germans entered, his head being carried 
 off by a bomb-shell. He was a faithful friend to 
 us; he had foreseen the budding talent of my 
 brother and felt no little pride in it. 
 
 The notabilities of the Royalist party closed in
 
 374 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 about the Gazette de Lyon ■ — Leopold de Gaillard, 
 who was made Councillor of State by the National 
 Assembly, Charles de Saint-Priest, the friend and 
 agent of the Comte de Chambord, Pierre de Valous, 
 curator of the library at Saint-Pierre Palace, the 
 two Penins, father and son, both of them steel 
 and copper engravers, and the sculptor Fabisch. 
 
 There we also met with Claudius H^brard, a 
 Lyon citizen transferred to Paris, where he had 
 become the titulary poet of the meetings of Cath- 
 olic working men. A bard quite solitary in his 
 kind, toward whom the Royalist party has shown 
 ingratitude, he went to religious meetings of the 
 people and recited there various verses which he 
 improvised with too much facility and which have 
 not survived the circumstances that inspired 
 them. 
 
 Although he lived in Paris, he edited a monthly 
 periodical which appeared at Lyon under the 
 title oi Journal des Bons Exemples : it was that 
 which very often brought H^brard back to his 
 native town. 
 
 At the time he was in all the splendor of his 
 passing notoriety and, owing to our ignorance of 
 degrees and classifications in literature, he real- 
 ized in our eyes the finished type of the man of 
 letters. 
 
 We were very grateful for his natural kindli- 
 ness, which made him treat us, young, timid and 
 obscure as we were, like comrades. And then he 
 brought with him that fragrance of Paris which 
 we inhaled with vast delight.
 
 My Brother and I. 375 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 Introduced into these surroundings of Royalism 
 and literature, we met a kindly welcome and as 
 much encouragement as if we were about to 
 become the hope of the party. When I was a 
 clerk with Descours, I had written in secret some 
 articles of literary criticism, penning them in a 
 fragmentary way between two carriage blanks to 
 be filled up. The Gazette received thern and 
 printed them ; from that time on I became quite 
 one of the staff. At the suggestion of Claudius 
 H^brard, I wrote in the same fragmentary way a 
 novel which I have absolutely forgotten, even to 
 its subject. I sent it to the Journal des Bons 
 Exeynples which did not publish it and neglected 
 to send it back. Notwithstanding these attempts, 
 my family scarcely believed in my vocation. Dur- 
 ing the few moments which my office work left 
 me I heard my father and mother exclaiming 
 without cessation: "Stick to money figures." 
 Alas, those miserable sums! My brother was 
 luckier, because under pretext of study he could 
 devote himself freely to his natural bent. He 
 took advantage of it by writing a novel in his 
 own turn. His work was called L^o et Chr^tienne
 
 2i'j6 Alphonse Daudet, 
 
 Fleiiry; it was the story of a young soldier whom 
 a strong devotion to his family had led into an 
 adventure which was considered a criminal lack of 
 discipline by his superiors. He died under the 
 guns of a patrol and almost beneath the eyes of 
 his mother and sister, who had come too late to 
 save him. 
 
 The story began with a dozen letters exchanged 
 between his brother and sister. Whatever there 
 lay of grace, brightness, freshness of heart and 
 originality of style in Alphonse Daudet made its 
 appearance in this correspondence. The story 
 which forms the second part was saturated with 
 emotion and entirely impregnated with the sweet 
 perfume of youth and tenderness. 
 
 One evening my brother read this novel to the 
 assembled family. We wept as we listened and, 
 wild with enthusiasm, I ran to offer the manu- 
 script to Mayery. He was thunderstruck. What ! 
 a collegian fifteen years old had written such 
 exquisite pages .■* It was not to be believed! 
 Nevertheless he was forced to give way before 
 the proofs and promised to publish the romance 
 in the Gazette de Lyon as soon as the author had 
 made a slight change which he thought necessary 
 for the interest of the story. 
 
 From that moment to this, what has happened 
 to the masterpiece .■' I have forgot. Undoubtedly 
 Mayery kept it among his papers ; but we were 
 prevented from getting it back from him by cer- 
 tain incidents which intervened and hurried for- 
 ward the course of our destiny. And since the
 
 My Brother and I. 2)77 
 
 Gazette was suppressed soon after, it is probable 
 that the manuscript was lost. 
 
 Though twenty-five years have elapsed since 
 then, the impression left upon my memory by L^o 
 et Chr^tUnnc Flcury has remained vivid enough to 
 give me the right to say, that if that novel had 
 been published it would have been entirely worthy 
 of a place in a collection of my brother's work. 
 This is a fact that one may properly insist upon, 
 for it is a confirmation of everything that is 
 known concerning Alphonse Daudet's talents, 
 among the high qualities of which, when its 
 origins and first manifestations are examined, an 
 extraordinary precocity must be noted. 
 
 Other studies in verse or prose which date from 
 the same time may be found in his books. If one 
 considers the age at which they were written, 
 they are the productions of a child ; but judged 
 by their intrinsic merit they are the work of an 
 able craftsman who has acquired the knowledge 
 of his trade without an effort and possesses it in 
 a certain way as a natural gift. This privilege 
 of destiny has been worthily used by my brother; 
 he has earned it by the ardor of his constant 
 struggle for better work, by a self-criticism which 
 urges him to carve and model his inspirations 
 with the most tenacious patience and by the 
 respect he shows his reader and his own talent 
 — a respect which makes him sufficiently master 
 of himself to refuse to permit a page to leave his 
 hands before he has expended upon it the full 
 force of his genius for improvement. And it may
 
 2,^8 Alphoiise Daudet. 
 
 be said that he has nothing to regret in what he 
 has written. 
 
 The authorized edition of his lifework, the 
 publication of which has just begun (1881) in a 
 form seldom employed by writers during their 
 lifetime, will include everything which he has 
 published — everything, without exception. 
 
 When he came to prepare it, there was nothing 
 for him to prune away; everything was consid- 
 ered good enough to be included. In this epoch 
 of hasty productions, improvised under the spur 
 of necessity, how many are there among us whose 
 works could undergo such a trial as that } 
 
 How many are there, and I am speaking now of 
 the most illustrious among those whose talent has 
 crowned their vogue and consecrated their success, 
 who in their early life have not written books 
 which were too quickly conceived and too rapidly 
 finished — books they would like to have effaced 
 from the list of their published works.-* 
 
 How many are there who are not bent upon 
 dating their works from a relatively recent period, 
 prior to which they wrote volumes which they 
 would not dare to avow any longer and which they 
 would absolutely refuse to reprint to-day .'' Few 
 are they who, helped by a lucky fortune, or far- 
 sighted enough at the very threshold of their 
 career, have been able to guard themselves from 
 these dangers. Alphonse Daudet is one of them. 
 
 But that is not the only example of the lucky 
 chance which mounted guard about his literary 
 cradle. He did not have any "high-water book"
 
 My Brother and I. 379 
 
 — that is to say, any book by means of which, with 
 a reference to its great success, critics are able to 
 crush the volumes which the same author pub- 
 lishes later. 
 
 In their character as novelists the Goncourts, 
 who are so important because of their historical 
 work, have always remained the authors of Gcr- 
 minie Lacerteux ; many as have been the charming 
 novels which have come from their bold and inno- 
 vating pens, none have equalled the memory of 
 that one, which is forever recalled when their 
 name is thought of and their character described. 
 
 Let limile Zola write as many masterpieces as 
 he chooses, people will always bring forward 
 L' AssoMinotr, the book which made his reputa- 
 tion, defined his manner and exhausted his lit- 
 erary procedures — after the production of which 
 he could not astonish the world any more! 
 
 Gustave Flaubert is dead, crushed in a literary 
 sense beneath the weight of the very proper 
 success of Madame Bovary. Indeed that itself 
 was the great sorrow of the end of his life. It 
 reached such a pitch with him that he became 
 irritated when one spoke to him concerning the 
 resounding success of that novel. When Ernest 
 Renan wrote to him a long and eloquent letter 
 after the publication of La Tentation de Saint 
 Antoine, authorizing him to publish it in the 
 newspapers, Flaubert neglected to give it pub- 
 licity for the sole reason that the letter ended 
 with the wish to have him return to the methods 
 and manner of writing: which had brought him
 
 380 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 glory. And when Renan was astounded at such 
 touchiness: 
 
 "My dear fellow," responded Flaubert, "I dis- 
 like poor jokes very much; and I have had rather 
 too much of that kind of joke I Always and always 
 Madmne Bovary! " 
 
 "That sort of a joke," as poor Flaubert said, 
 "has never been made and never will be made" 
 on Alphonse Daudet. All the chapters he has 
 written have obtained, pretty equally, the favor of 
 the public. Those who contested his power in 
 fecundity, while doing homage to his talent, when 
 he had only published his Lettres de Mon Moulin 
 or the Contes du Ltindi, place at present in the 
 same rank, whatever their preferences may be, 
 Le Petit Chose, Tartarin de Tarascon, Fromont 
 Jeune et Risler Aini, Jack, Le Nabab, Les Rois en 
 Exit and Ninna Rojimestan. They do not dream 
 of using one of these books, so varied in their 
 inspiration, to depreciate the other. For each 
 one in succession reveals a new effort and a con- 
 stant progress in the author. 
 
 This literary conscience, so powerful and severe 
 toward itself, was aroused in my brother along 
 with the growth of his talent. It affords a clew 
 to his processes, his stern determination to render 
 perfect the expression of his thought and his 
 hourly battles with words, which he grinds and 
 kneads and renders subtle in accordance with the 
 flow of his imagination. 
 
 " Style is the fragrance of literary work," cried 
 he one day; and in fact every one of his books
 
 My Brother a7id I. 381 
 
 represents an almost superhuman labor. There is 
 many an easy-flowing, harmonious page, over 
 which the sentences march with majesty, like 
 some river that rolls across its bed fine scales of 
 gold; but on that page there remains not one 
 trace of the effort which it cost him; and yet that 
 admirably gifted artist, who was never satisfied 
 with his own work, has perspired and suffered 
 and turned pale over it, to the point of feeling 
 broken in health for several days through the 
 mere excess of labor. 
 
 Let us therefore not be astonished that he has 
 conquered fortune and glory. Glory and fortune 
 represent the well-earned reward of a tremendous 
 worker who, at the very beginning, had the cour- 
 age to reject gains easy to obtain and never 
 sacrificed anything to improvisation, even when, 
 being still a boy, he was struggling with the mate- 
 rial difficulties of life; as a man at forty years of 
 age he can flatter himself to have made the culti- 
 vation of letters the highest aim of his life.
 
 382 Alphonse DaudeL 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 Thus it was that the inborn love for letters broke 
 the clouds upon our gloomy horizon; it opened 
 up a luminous point and gilded the threshold of 
 our youth, taking the place of all those, pleasures 
 of which we were deprived. But it was none too 
 much to outbalance the anguish of mind which 
 befell us as soon as our family affairs were borne 
 in upon us again. 
 
 Things went from bad to worse every day in 
 that respect. During the course of 1856 our 
 father had to abandon entirely the enterprises 
 which he had begun. After seven years of cease- 
 less labor there was no result except a deficit 
 which was simply crushing us. Strangled by 
 debts, he had turned every way to find some re- 
 source. After having struggled desperately 
 against ill luck Vincent Daudet was at the end 
 of his rope. Poverty benumbed him. There was 
 a moment when he had hoped to find some lender 
 of capital who would aid him to carry on his busi- 
 ness ; but his search was in vain and he gave 
 it up. 
 
 One morning he sold in a single parcel all 
 the merchandise which remained in the shop, 
 balanced his accounts and demanded and obtained
 
 My Brother and I. 383 
 
 from his creditors extension of time. Then he 
 entered as partner a wine business, where he 
 would have gained the bread necessary to his 
 family and a good deal more, if he had known 
 how to bend to the demands of his new situation. 
 But a long habit of commanding others made the 
 place very soon intolerable to him. Resignation 
 also was not long in reaching its limits; then he 
 left Lyon for Paris, where his friends had caused 
 him to hope for a position in closer conformity to 
 his taste. 
 
 From that moment until the day when Fate 
 permitted his sons to grant him the repose which 
 he had so cruelly and laboriously earned, our poor 
 father was like a swallow fluttering about within 
 bounds that impede its flight and weary its wings 
 and eyes — a bird striking against those walls 
 beyond which it knows the wide atmosphere and 
 open space exist, and ending by falling and dying, 
 worn out by its despairing efforts. He tried ten 
 different businesses and looked for employment 
 in commerce and in government offices. One 
 moment he thought he had fortune in his grasp 
 with a certain discovery in industrial matters 
 which has enriched others since. Then his hopes 
 vanished and his strength was used up by the 
 weight of his disasters. Discouragement took 
 hold of him and he was forced to throw upon our 
 shoulders the care of rebuilding his ruined hearth. 
 He has enjoyed the happiness of seeing it rebuilt. 
 Notwithstanding the long malady which finally 
 took him from us, his last years have been
 
 384 Alphonse Da7idet. 
 
 serene, peaceful and beautified by the happiness 
 of his children, which became his own personal 
 happiness. 
 
 When he had decided to quit his trade we left 
 the mournful house in Pas-fitroit Street and set- 
 tled down in a modest entresol on the Rue de 
 Castries in the middle of a wind-swept and smil- 
 ing quarter between Bellecour Place and Perrache 
 Allee. At that time Alphonse and I were in the 
 liveliest effervescence of a literary life and most 
 delighted to begin to give free vent to our aims 
 and aspirations. It seemed to us that we had 
 recovered some independence in this new apart- 
 ment, away from the neighborhood of the shop 
 with its bales of silk and piles of scarfs and 
 everything else that recalled the causes of our 
 ruin to us. My brother finished up his studies 
 by one vigorous effort ; and, for my part, I under- 
 took to complete mine by giving to my education 
 all the leisure that my ofifice work allowed me. 
 
 Both of us worked pretty solidly at that time, 
 happy as we were in our voluntary labor, so that, 
 notwithstanding the wretched ending of our stay 
 in Lyon, this epoch of our lives seems less sor- 
 rowful when we look at it through the memories 
 that remain about the Rue de Castries. 
 
 Still, it was there we learned of the death of our 
 elder brother Henri. 
 
 I said before that he wanted to enter into 
 orders and had begun his ecclesiastical studies at 
 the seminary at Allix. He did not stay there 
 long. When he reached the sub-deaconship, just
 
 My Brother and I 385 
 
 before pronouncing the final vows, his soul, ill 
 and troubled by the excess of a devotion pushed 
 beyond measure, had conceived scruples and 
 doubts concerning the sincerity he was bringing 
 to his vocation. So he had returned to us, to the 
 great disgust of my father, who could not under- 
 stand at all what such hesitations meant. 
 
 For several months he had lived near us, try- 
 ing to teach piano lessons and, in consequence 
 of some chance, playing the organ in one of the 
 parishes of the city. Then, weary of a life that 
 had no aim, he left for Nimes, where the Abb6 
 d'Alzon offered him a position on the staff of in- 
 structors at Assumption College. I have kept 
 most of the letters which our poor Henri wrote to 
 us at that time. They are full of tender counsels 
 for Alphonse and me, but they reveal the greatest 
 lack of experience of the world and show a way 
 of seeing life through the veils of a somewhat 
 narrow mysticism which fitted ill those inexorable 
 demands upon us which we were about to experi- 
 ence in the near future. 
 
 But they revealed at the same time a soul full 
 of endless kindness and thoroughly penetrated 
 by the ideal. I have always thought that if my 
 elder brother had lived, his spirit, whilst it grew 
 more manly, would have shaken off the prejudices 
 and doubts which weakened it, and that, having 
 cast aside the hankering after the priesthood, his 
 actual talents as a musician and pianist, while 
 developing themselves, would have helped him to 
 find the true path of his career, that of art. 
 
 25
 
 386 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 One day a letter from Assumption College sud- 
 denly announced to us that he had been attacked 
 by brain fever. My mother left at once, but she 
 reached Nimes too late to find her son alive. Her 
 only and supreme consolation consisted in the 
 privilege of pressing her lips to the forehead of 
 that young Levite, transfigured by death and 
 lying white and fair upon a pillow in its flood of 
 black hair. She had already suffered so much 
 that this catastrophe found no place on her heart 
 for a new scar. Those wounds which had been 
 open and bleeding this, long time only grew a 
 little deeper, and that was all. Mater dolorosa! 
 
 The news of this disaster arrived in a despatch 
 which my father and Alphonse received one even- 
 ing just at nightfall, and which I read a few 
 minutes later as I returned from my office. We 
 wept together till a late hour of the night; then 
 our mother returned and life took us up again, a 
 little more sorrowful and wounded in soul than 
 before. 
 
 Our solitary amusement at that time consisted 
 in going on fine days to listen to the music in 
 Bellecour Square. There we met Mayery, Beur- 
 theret and Ludovic Penin. We walked about 
 together, talking oftenest of literature and art, 
 already grave and attentive little men and filled 
 with a feeling of pride in the precocious bril- 
 liancy we showed as men of letters — a brilliancy 
 which did not fail to flatter our vanity somewhat. 
 Since writing Lio et Chritienne Fleury Alphonse 
 was a person of consideration in those surround-
 
 My Brother and I. 387 
 
 ings. When he left us to go back to the comrades 
 of his own age, they talked of his verses and his 
 talent; brilliant hopes were attached to his future 
 and for a moment our parents felt their miseries 
 assuaged when I repeated to them what our friends 
 had said of their young son. 
 
 While speaking of Lyon and Bellecour Square 
 it is impossible for me to refrain from saying 
 something about Marshal de Castellane, who was 
 one of the most vivid impressions of our youth. 
 It was at the "music hour" that he showed him- 
 self to the people of Lyon. A thousand anec- 
 dotes of his present and past existence passed 
 from mouth to mouth and let loose about him an 
 amount of curiosity which reached the point of 
 mania. He was one of the grand attractions of 
 our walk. All of a sudden we heard the drums 
 beating to quarters; the detail of soldiers on the 
 square shouldered arms, whilst the marshal on 
 horseback came down the street and turned the 
 corner of Bourbon Street, always in full uniform, 
 wearing in brave show his military chapeau wav- 
 ing with white feathers. After having saluted 
 the guard, he mingled among the people, walk- 
 ing to and fro, a single eyeglass stuck in his eye. 
 He had most singular and eccentric sides to his 
 character. But what an admirable soldier he was, 
 and what a splendid military life was his! 
 
 My brother left college in August of that year 
 and had nothing further to do than to present 
 himself for examination in order to obtain his 
 baccalaureate. Unfortunately a difficulty only
 
 o 
 
 88 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 too well foreseen was about to rise in this direc* 
 tion and the impossibility of solving it was about 
 to determine our parents to take a very great 
 resolution in a matter which touched my poor 
 Alphonse profoundly. 
 
 At that time the course for examination for the 
 bachelor's degree amounted to a relatively impor- 
 tant sum. However manfully my father might 
 bleed himself, he could never succeed in procur- 
 ing it and still less in abstracting it from his 
 household expenses, which were rigorously lim- 
 ited to the most pressing needs of our family life. 
 It is true that his son was quite young enough to 
 wait and defer his examination for a year. But 
 in the meantime what should he do with himself.? 
 
 This being the condition of things, a singular 
 proposition reached us from the South. One of 
 our relatives advised my father to beg the admis- 
 sion of Alphonse to the college at Alais as a 
 teacher; he had ascertained that the gates of that 
 college would open wide in welcome before the 
 grandnephew of Abbe Reynaud and that his 
 youth would not be an obstacle. The child — for 
 he was still a child — might prepare himself 
 there for his examinations, live a whole year with- 
 out any cost to his family and even put some 
 money aside, no matter how small his salary 
 might be. 
 
 At any other time my father and mother would 
 have resolutely rejected this proposition, being 
 quite upset at the thought of separating them- 
 selves from their youngest son and delivering
 
 My Brother and I. 389 
 
 him up to the harsh experiences of a humble and 
 almost disdained profession; but in the situation 
 where we then were our future preoccupied them 
 less than the immediate necessities of our life 
 from day to day. 
 
 After all, it was as good an entrance as another 
 into the profession of teacher! The sweetest 
 memories of the youth of my mother were attached 
 to that college at Alais. In memory she saw it 
 again, always just as she had seen it long ago, 
 when the intelligent and paternal management of 
 "our uncle the Abbe" kept it flourishing and 
 made a delightful spot of it in which to live. 
 
 These considerations, joined to actual neces- 
 sity, swayed the lot of my brother and his de- 
 parture was decided upon. He accepted his new 
 destiny courageously, happy to be able to assist 
 his family and enchanted first and foremost at 
 his maiden voyage into an unknown land, the 
 adventures of which he was very far from sus- 
 pecting. 
 
 As for me, although I understood the wisdom 
 of it, this resolution confounded me. The idea 
 of separating myself from my brother broke my 
 heart. I considered how young he was, how poor 
 in experience and how badly armed for the trials 
 which he was about to undergo! 
 
 Sixteen years of age, with a tender soul and a 
 sensitive imagination, having all the weakness of 
 ^his youth and a signal awkwardness when con- 
 fronted by material difficulties, added to a dis- 
 tressing shortness of sight — how could he put
 
 390 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 such a matter through? But, alas, my own 
 powerlessness was equal to my sorrow ! it was 
 absolutely necessary to be resigned, 
 
 "In this family the members had begun to get 
 used to misfortune. The day following that 
 memorable affair, the entire family accompanied 
 le Petit Chose to the boat. . . . All of a sudden 
 the bell rang — it was necessary to part — le Petit 
 Chose, tearing himself from the embraces of his 
 friends, stepped bravely across the landing-plank. 
 
 " ' Be a good boy ! ' cried his father to him. 
 
 "'Don't get sick,' said Madame Eyssette. 
 
 "Jacques wanted to speak, but he could not; 
 he was crying too hard." 
 
 Yes, indeed, Jacques was crying; but they were 
 not the snivelling tears of childhood, they were 
 the fertile weeping of his precocious manhood, 
 dragged from his eyes by the acute sorrow of that 
 separation, which was the bitterest sorrow he had 
 yet been called upon to suffer. . He saw the future 
 through his tears. And the more sorrowful the 
 present hour was, the more he clung to that future 
 with confidence, forming beneath the very blows 
 of defeat new projects with a view to revenge for 
 present ills, with which that comrade was closely 
 associated whom the swift flood of the Rhdne 
 was carrying far away. 
 
 " Le Petit Chose did not cry, not he. As I 
 have already had the honor to inform you, he was 
 a grand philosopher, and, really, it will not do 
 for philosophers to yield to weakness. . . . And 
 nevertheless, God knows how he loved them,
 
 My Brother and I. 391 
 
 those dear people whom he left behind him in 
 the fog ! God knows whether he would not have 
 gladly given for their sake his entire blood and 
 flesh! But what would you? The joy of leaving 
 Lyon, the movement of the boat, the intoxica- 
 tion of making a voyage, the pride of feeling that 
 he was a man — a free and complete man, jour 
 neying alone and gaining his own livelihood — 
 all that intoxicated le Petit Chose and prevented 
 him from dreaming, as he ought to have done, 
 about the three darling persons who were sobbing 
 back there, standing on the quays of the Rhdne."
 
 392 Alp house Daudet 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 My brother's departure made us a little more 
 sorrowful. Several months elapsed without 
 bringing us anything else save successive aggre- 
 gations of our misfortunes, which were so many 
 witnesses to the severity with which bad luck 
 -hounded us. The clouds which had been heaping 
 up so long upon our horizon grew darker day by 
 day and a catastrophe grew imminent. I felt it 
 approaching and prepared for it. 
 
 After all, in the wretched situation where we 
 found ourselves, would it not be better that Fate 
 should exhaust its furies on us in a final storm .'* 
 When it had finally beaten us down and had dis- 
 persed the very fragments of our hearth, it would 
 doubtless move elsewhere to strike its blows and 
 give us a free moment to build up that which it 
 had destroyed. 
 
 Besides, a supreme disaster would take us out 
 of the harassing uncertainties among which we 
 were battling. Then it would be necessary to 
 make a resolution; I could go to Paris — that 
 unknown Paris, where so many others before us 
 had arrived obscure, unhappy and disinherited and 
 found there the end of their misery. Decided
 
 My Brother and I. 393 
 
 to imitate them, I often talked to my mother of 
 my plan, but she feared for me, having lost the 
 very power to conceive of hope. What would I 
 do if I went to Paris? It would have been some- 
 thing if I had even had some certain employment ! 
 
 "I will get a position in the telegraph offices," 
 said I to her one day, recollecting that we had 
 an old friend of the family in the administration 
 of that government department. 
 
 On hearing this she regarded my project with 
 greater tranquillity and talked to my father about 
 it during one of his infrequent stops at Lyon, for 
 he was then much away. 
 
 "There is nothing to do but to let him follow 
 freely his own inspiration," answered he. 
 
 From that moment I dreamed of nothing but 
 the trip and especially of the means to effect it, 
 for it was exactly the most wretched part of our 
 condition that any project, however advantageous 
 it might be, could not be carried out if any ad- 
 vance of money, even a small one, were necessary. 
 Fortunately, and it is with intention that I employ 
 that word, a catastrophe did arrive, which allowed 
 me to realize the idea which I had been caressing 
 with such perseverance. 
 
 During the whole year we had been inhabiting 
 the apartment in the Rue de Castries the land- 
 lord had not known, as the vulgar saying runs, the 
 color of our money. He had begun by showing 
 a great deal of patience. What he knew about 
 us had interested him in our fortune; and when, 
 again and again, the bills for rent presented by
 
 394 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 the janitor had come back to him unpaid, he had 
 contented himself with sending a courteous de- 
 mand to my father. 
 
 But that patience could not last always. Now 
 we owed him for three quarters and the bill for 
 the fourth was approaching. At his own request 
 his business agent came to demand payment. He 
 clothed this demand in the most polite forms; but 
 one felt the hand of iron beneath the glove and 
 under the smooth words of the man of the world 
 the insistence of the creditor. He had been 
 glad to accord delays to us because we were 
 honest people and especially because he believed 
 that our lack of funds was merely temporary. But 
 he could not wait any longer for the payment of 
 the debt already contracted, nor allow us to re- 
 main longer in the apartment if our inability to 
 pay the rent should continue. This notification 
 to quit left us without any resource. In the 
 absence of my father I counselled with my mother 
 how we might be able to face the trouble and 
 we came to an agreement and recognized that it 
 could only be done through the sale of our furni- 
 ture. The furniture sold and the most pressing 
 debts paid, my mother could leave with her 
 daughter for the South, where one of her sisters 
 offered her a roof, whilst I could go to seek my 
 fortune in Paris and hasten our reunion. 
 
 I had so lively a faith in my own star and in 
 that of my brother, I uttered my hopes in such a 
 tone of conviction that the dear good woman was 
 not able to prevent herself from sharing them
 
 My Brother and I. 395 
 
 and thus received a certain relief from the bitter- 
 ness of those cruel hours. 
 
 Hardly conceived and approved by my father, 
 to whom a long letter set forth the whole matter, 
 when this heroic plan was put into execution. 
 I notified Descours of my near departure and 
 bravely announced to him that I was going to "do 
 literature " in Paris. 
 
 " I always thought that you would end in that 
 way," answered the good-natured man. "Good 
 luck to you." 
 
 Then I went to see the agent for our apartment 
 house. I imparted to him our resolution and 
 begged him to spare us the judicial proceedings 
 and permit the sale of our furniture in a kindly 
 spirit. He entered into my views of the case and 
 together we made an inventory of the objects that 
 filled our apartment. He permitted me to set 
 aside a certain number, the sale of which would 
 have broken poor mamma's heart ; she was already 
 on her way to the South. I took three days to 
 pack them up, in order to send them after her 
 and did this business with joy in my heart and a 
 song upon my lips, convinced that this unhappy 
 hour would only bring us together again in luckier 
 days. 
 
 Thus was the dispersion of the ruins of our 
 hearth accomplished. This time it was all up 
 with the family centre. There was nothing for 
 it save to build it up again somewhere else. On 
 the evening of that day the bills were all settled ; 
 and when the part for the creditors and that for
 
 396 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 my mother had been set aside, there remained for 
 me only a few louis-d'or; these at least owed noth- 
 ing to anybody and permitted me to reach Paris 
 eight days afterward with fifty francs in my 
 pocket. 
 
 During the last week of my stay in Lyon I 
 lived with Paul Beurtheret,. who had in the most 
 paternal way offered me half his room. 
 
 That week was consecrated to the preparations 
 for departure. I had been often told that in 
 order to succeed in Paris it was necessary to 
 show one's self well clad and exhibit no trace of 
 wretchedness whatever. "Make yourself envied," 
 Beurtheret kept repeating; "never allow yourself 
 to be pitied ! " Filled with such counsels, I had 
 ordered an entire wardrobe of clothes from my 
 tailor, because, notwithstanding my lack of money, 
 I did have a tailor; not a poor devil of a janitor 
 who stitches new cloth on old, but an elegant 
 tailor, high-priced and of great repute with the 
 fashionables of Lyon, who had opened a credit 
 for me on my general good appearance, promising 
 to continue it to my brother and me just as long 
 as we should find it necessary. 
 
 Such a speculation had its dangers; for if we 
 had died meantime, I hardly know by whom and 
 how that good fellow would ever have been paid. 
 Nevertheless he had cause to congratulate him- 
 self for having believed in us. When we were in 
 condition to pay his bills, one may readily imag- 
 ine that there was no question of demanding the 
 least rebate. Thanks to his belief in us, we
 
 My Brother mid I. 397 
 
 were able, when we had scarce arrived in Paris 
 without a penny or parcel, to present ourselves 
 in certain drawing-rooms where the reputation of 
 Alphonse Daudet began and where I myself made 
 many precious friendships. 
 
 It would be difificult to pay too dearly for such 
 genuine services. But is it not a very modern 
 feature in manners and customs that such a bold 
 clothier should play at dice for a big pile against 
 the future of two little unknown fellows, both of 
 them under age, who had no heritage whatever to 
 expect and were as obscure as we were at that 
 time? 
 
 And now that the painful sojourn in Lyon is 
 done with, we shall talk of it no more, if so it 
 please you. Sorrows and humiliations, decep- 
 tions and tears remain down there, sunk within 
 the fogs of the Rhone, between those high dwell- 
 ings which make such narrow streets, deep as the 
 bottom of ditches. From that time forth our sky 
 continues to brighten with a vivid gleam of hope, 
 our paths go on enlarging before us and our 
 prolonged efforts begin to bear their first fruit.
 
 398 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 After a fatiguing journey in a third-class com- 
 partment I reaciied Paris at five oclock in the 
 morning, the first of September, 1857. Having 
 taken a room in a horrible little hotel in the 
 neighborhood of the Exchange, I was marching 
 along the Boulevard as early as eight o'clock in 
 the morning in evening dress, white cravat and 
 varnished shoes, as trig as any young bridegroom 
 on the morning of his wedding. I breakfasted at 
 Tortoni's. A perusal of the bill brought me back 
 to less lofty ideas and I likewise observed that 
 nobody except myself wore evening dress at that 
 early hour in the morning ; the very next day I 
 profited by that double lesson of my first day in 
 Paris. I owed a visit to Claudius H^brard ; he 
 had an elegant bachelor's apartment in the Rue de 
 Tournon. It just happened that he was leaving 
 that very night for Lyon, where he intended to 
 stay a whole month. After having taken me 
 about Paris, he offered to install me in his 
 apartment until his return, so that, thanks to 
 him, during his entire absence I dwelt most com- 
 fortably established, like the young son of a well- 
 to-do family.
 
 My Brother and I. 399 
 
 I had brought two letters of recommendation 
 with mc — one from Paul Beurtherct for his pro- 
 vincial comrade Armand Barthet, author of Le 
 Moineau de Lesbie, the other from Leopold de 
 Gaillard for Armand de Pontmartin, whose books 
 I had presented in a criticism to the readers of the 
 Gazette de Lyon. 
 
 Barthet received me like an old friend and 
 begged me to come to see him often, authorizing 
 me to profit by his right of entry into the Odeon 
 theatre, whither he never went. I really owe this 
 confession to M. de la Rounat, who was then, 
 as he is to-day, the director of that theatre. For 
 an entire winter I went to the plays there given 
 by negligently throwing down before the wicket- 
 keepers the name of an author whose work the 
 great Rachel had played in her time at the Theatre 
 Fran^ais. Most extraordinary was the fact that 
 my extreme youth did not in any way astonish 
 the gentlemen who kept the wickets, and that 
 later, about two years afterwards, when I obtained 
 the right of entry for myself, they were not 
 astonished at all to see me become Ernest Daudet, 
 after having been for so long a time Armand 
 Barthet. 
 
 Having read the letter from Leopold de Gail- 
 lard, the Comte de Pontmartin passed his arm 
 under mine and conducted me round into Bergere 
 Street to the newspaper office of Le Spectateur, 
 an Orleanist sheet which had taken the place of 
 L' Assemhlee Nationale, which had been suppressed 
 a little while before. Being presented to Mallac,
 
 400 Alphonse Daudet, 
 
 the brilliant director of the Spcctateur, I thought 
 I was in a dream when he informed me that at the 
 request of Pontmartin he engaged me among his 
 editors with fixed emoluments of 200 francs a 
 month. Two hundred francs ! That meant my 
 livelihood assured; that meant the certainty of 
 being able to assist our mother; that also meant 
 the possibility of calling Alphonse to Paris! 
 
 And all this had already happened the second 
 day of my arrival ! Had I not good reason to 
 believe in our lucky star? I took possession of 
 my employment a few weeks later. I was put to 
 general city reports on the paper. My task was 
 easy enough and gave me hours of leisure which' 
 I consecrated entirely to study. And I had so 
 much to learn ! 
 
 At the end of the month the return of Claudius 
 Hebrard obliged me to look for a lodging. There 
 happened to be a furnished house in that very 
 Rue de Tournon, a great barrack of students, 
 entitled pompously the "Grand Hotel du Senat." 
 There I hired a miserable little chamber in the 
 roof on the fifth story — fifteen francs a month ; 
 that price has its own eloquence ! — an iron truckle 
 bed, a wretched bureau, which served also as 
 toilet-table, a desk, two chairs, a broken stove of 
 pottery, a bit of carpet on the red tiles — such 
 was my interior. Through my single window I 
 could see nothing but roofs, chimneys and dormer 
 windows, and, raising their tiresome architecture 
 above my narrow horizon, the round towers of 
 the church of Saint-Sulpice.
 
 My Brother and I. 401 
 
 On a sombre October evening, when I found 
 myself alone for the first time in that poverty- 
 stricken lodging, after quitting the luxurious 
 apartment of Claudius H6brard, the transition was 
 so cruel and the feeling of my wretchedness so 
 profound, that my youthful courage, weakened by 
 loneliness, the tension on my nerves and excess 
 of labor, was seized with fear. My father without 
 an occupation; my mother so far away and living 
 in a house which was not hers, and my brother 
 very wretched in his college! these were just so 
 many sorrowful visions rudely brought to bear 
 upon my mind by the forbidding look of the walls 
 of my chamber, on which the paper, meant to con- 
 ceal its rawness, floated down in long torn pieces. 
 I was frightened at the extent of my task and by 
 the weight of my responsibility and I wept in 
 silence. 
 
 But this impression was only passing and it 
 was the memory of my brother, of that brave com- 
 rade whose talent I recognized and in whom I 
 had as much faith as in myself, that dissipated 
 these melancholy thoughts. 
 
 At that very time he was suffering in quite a 
 different way from me. After leaving Lyon he 
 v»^ent to stay a few days with our family, first at 
 Nimes, where brotherly hearts received him with 
 tenderness, and then in the neighborhood of the 
 Vigan, deep within the C6vennes in the Gard, at 
 the house of some young and pretty girl cousins. 
 
 Our sixteen-year poet, who from that time forth 
 began to sing of beauty, of nature and of love, 
 
 26
 
 402 Alphonse Datidet. 
 
 saw the termination of his short vacation arriving 
 all too soon to please his wishes; but it was nec- 
 essary to leave for Alais. 
 
 When he came to the door of the college and 
 knocked to enter, he was so small, timid and 
 slender, that at first he was taken for a scholar. 
 For a moment the principal was on the point of 
 sending him away. 
 
 " Why, he is a child ! " exclaimed the professor, 
 jumping up and down on his chair. "What do 
 they suppose I can do with a child.'' " 
 
 " For one moment le Petit Chose was seized by 
 a terrible fear; he had a vision of himself turned 
 into the street without anything to eat. He 
 hardly had the force of mind to stutter a few 
 words and to hand to the principal the letter of 
 introduction to him which he had about him." 
 
 That letter worked marvels; the reminiscence 
 of "our uncle the Abb6 " protected my brother 
 and they kept him. Thus it was that he began to 
 earn his bread — very bitter bread it is true, often 
 moistened with tears of humiliation and rage. 
 
 He has related his burning sorrows in various 
 pages which have become famous. Turn to Le 
 Petit Chose. He is Le Petit Chose and Sarlande 
 is Alais ; in that part of his novel where his imag- 
 ination has studded with the finest of pearls a 
 groundwork of truth, all that was necessary for 
 him to do was to call up in memory the distant 
 actualities in order to fill his account with a sin- 
 cere and moving emotion. 
 
 His pupils were for the most part sons of
 
 My Brother and I. 403 
 
 peasants, or badly educated little scions of the 
 gentry who took a hatred to that small pion, so 
 distinguished-looking, delicate and proud, as 
 handsome as a young god ; one whose look indi- 
 cated cleverness, whilst all his gestures showed 
 beneath his rustic garments a native elegance. 
 His delicacy was shocking to their own coarse- 
 ness and their brutality made sport of his physi- 
 cal weakness. Gladly would he have taken part 
 in their games and he only asked that they 
 should treat him as a comrade; but they exas- 
 perated him by their meanness. 
 
 What malicious children they were! One day, 
 what did they think of, but to drag across the dark 
 staircase an old trunk all bristling with nails.-* 
 Alphonse could not see it and he had a bad 
 tumble which came very near killing him. An- 
 other time, whilst out walking, it was necessary 
 to engage in fisticuffs with one of them — a 
 powerful fellow who had rebelled against his 
 authority. The worst of it was, that after these 
 adventures the principal always placed him in the 
 wrong ; he was anxious to keep his pupils and, as 
 for 2, pion, that sort could easily be replaced ! 
 
 My brother only escaped from these daily mis- 
 haps to return to a humble provincial interior, 
 unhealthy, full of envy, perverted and grotesquely 
 skeptical, peopled by billiard players, smokers of 
 pipes, frequenters of tap-houses, forming a com- 
 pletely dense and foolish Bohemia, where at every 
 moment some trick was played upon his simple- 
 mindedness.
 
 404 Alphojise Daudet. 
 
 If this torture had continued, to what desperate 
 resolutions might he not have been moved! The 
 news of my departure from Lyon increased its 
 severity; my brother understood that he had not 
 much longer to suffer and he turned his look 
 toward Paris; for thence it was that he hoped to 
 see the arrival of deliverance and happiness. One 
 day in answer to a letter even more heartrending 
 than the others I wrote to him : " Come! " And, 
 all bruised and wounded, the little bird spread 
 its wings to find a refuge near to me.
 
 My Brother and I. 405 
 
 CHAPTER XVI.i 
 
 Twice over has Alphonse Daudet told the story 
 of his arrival in Paris; for the first time in Le 
 Petit Chose and for a second in Le Nouveau 
 Teynps, a newspaper in St. Petersburg which 
 brought his works to the knowledge of Russia. 
 In the latter he has published, beside other 
 things, some episodes from his life as a man of 
 letters, written in the form of an autobiography. 
 Except in a very slight number of details, the two 
 stories hardly differ one from the other. That 
 one which brings up again the entire reality in 
 pa'ges full of emotion is hardly less attractive than 
 the other, which merely used that reality as a 
 source of inspiration by borrowing from it various 
 features suitable for a romance. 
 
 1 Having come to this point in my account I ought to call to 
 memory the fact that whatever I have tried to say concerning my 
 brother's life relates to that part of it which is common to both 
 of us. As to that which is personal to him, I am bound to be 
 very brief, in order not to forestall the account which he ought to 
 make for himself, either in his memoirs or else in the story of 
 his works. I shall therefore say no more than what I consider 
 the necessary completion of that which I undertook to revive 
 from the past ; this ought to show the writer in full possession 
 of his manhood, after the picture of him as the timid child, whose 
 features so delicate and proud have been sketched by my 
 brotherly pencil.
 
 4o6 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 In both cases the scene is the same : A child 
 seventeen years old, unhappy and delicate, arriv- 
 ing in Paris with an empty stomach and a light 
 purse, observant, eager for the unknown, hunger- 
 ing for new sensations and filled with happy pre- 
 sentiments of the future, but made timid by the 
 extreme of his misery to the point of doubting 
 himself and fearing to believe in his own star — 
 a boy still too young and poor in experience to 
 measure the intellectual treasure which he carries 
 in his own mind. 
 
 As a framework to this picture there are the 
 first frosts of a very harsh winter — it was the first 
 of November, 1857 — two nights spent on the 
 hard bench of a third-class coach, the pestiferous 
 atmosphere of the coach, saturated with the smell 
 of brandy and tobacco, and then the entrance into 
 Paris at dawn, the comforting brotherly embrace, 
 the drive through the streets of the city just awak- 
 ening, the banging of the cab on the cobble- 
 stones, and then the surprise caused by the 
 appearance of the little bedroom succeeding upon 
 such profound impressions of the arrival — that 
 little chamber where the two were to live thence- 
 forward on privations, hard work and hope. 
 
 I shall not attempt to tell the story over again, 
 although the recollection of these things has 
 rerriained engraved upon my memory forever. I 
 only want to recall a single characteristic, the 
 wretched condition in which my brother reached 
 me. 
 
 I can see him still, worn out with weariness and
 
 My Brother and I. 407 
 
 actual need, nearly dead with cold, wrapped in 
 an old renovated overcoat out of fashion and, 
 lest an entirely original appearance should be 
 wanting to his equipment, shod over his blue 
 cotton stockings with india-rubber socks — those 
 socks of india-rubber which have won no little 
 notoriety in the world since they inspired one of 
 the chapters of Le Petit Chose. 
 
 Luckily that Lyon tailor was on hand. Thanks 
 to him, Alphonse Daudet was soon thoroughly 
 changed and made to look as a young poet should 
 who does not believe that rags and shoes worn 
 down at heel are necessary equipments for the 
 march toward the conquest of renown. 
 
 Even at that period he was handsome, with a 
 beauty altogether impossible to believe: "A mar- 
 vellously charming head" Theodore de Banville 
 wrote some years later in his Camtfes Parisiens. 
 "His complexion pale, yet with warmth and the 
 color of amber, his eyebrows straight and silky, 
 his eye brilliant yet deep, at once moist and burn- 
 ing — an eye lost in revery and one that does 
 not see, yet is most delightful to see — his mouth 
 sensuous, dreamy and rich with blood, his beard 
 soft and childlike, his hair abundant and brown 
 and his ear fine and delicate — all these come 
 together in a proudly masculine combination, 
 despite the feminine graces." 
 
 And now let the reader imagine this boy of 
 seventeen years turned loose in Paris, perfectly 
 free to follow his own bent and a mark for all 
 the dangers which rise up before young people in
 
 4o8 Alpkonse Datidet. 
 
 a great city — perils intensified for him I speak 
 of by his ignorance of customs as they made 
 themselves known to him, where everything was 
 the subject for surprise, anxiety and embarrass- 
 ment ! 
 
 Every morning I left for my newspaper; we 
 hardly saw each other again till evening and 
 although about that time some of our new friends 
 who were acquainted with the particulars of our 
 common existence had surnamed me " the mother," 
 my watchfulness was powerless to protect him as 
 much as I would have wished. 
 
 He has spoken, in the pages of his memoirs 
 which have already been published, of the first 
 weeks of his sojourn in Paris with a penetrating 
 melancholy. "With the exception of my brother 
 I knew nobody. Short-sighted and clumsy and 
 timid as a man of the woods, as soon as I left my 
 bedchamber I walked round the Odeon under the 
 arcade, delighted and at the same time frightened 
 at rubbing elbows with men of letters." This 
 melancholy loneliness did not last; very soon he 
 had his comrades in the Quartier Latin; later 
 some of them became his friends, such as Gam- 
 betta who was reading law and dwelt in the same 
 apartment house with us, Amed6e Rolland, Jean 
 du Bois, Bataille, Louis Bouilhet, Castagnary, 
 Pierre V6ron, Emmanuel des Essarts and many 
 others beside, among whom were Th^rion — the 
 philosopher Therion — whom one might meet any 
 minute with some old book under his arm, read- 
 ing everything, knowing everything, discussing
 
 My Brother and I. 409 
 
 everything, gesticulating about everything — a 
 scientist of rare merit, but of troubled mind and 
 a lofty soul — that unforgettable type, who was.to 
 become, later, Iilys^e Meraut in the Rois en 
 Exil. 
 
 My brother was thrown with a number of these 
 men living in the artistic and literary Bohemia 
 of that time, the third generation of that most 
 brilliant set after 1830 — namely with Theophile 
 Gautier, Gerard de Nerval, Arsene Houssaye and 
 the two Johannots — a Bohemia which had al- 
 ready been precipitated from its pedestal about 
 1850, when Henry Murger described its decadence, 
 and at the time we speak of was absolutely over- 
 thrown, having lost all its poetry and its attrac- 
 tions at the period when we reached Paris. 
 
 Since that time Bohemia has had two historians. 
 M. Jules Valles has found therein the subject of a 
 striking book, Les R^fractaires. My brother knew 
 there the unsuccessful "down-at-heels " described 
 in "Jack." Nobody has described and no one 
 hereafter will describe as well as he did what 
 impotence, jealousy, narrowness of view and un- 
 conscious perversity existed among those poor 
 wretches whom laziness conquered without a 
 battle. Surely it is a species of miracle, as I 
 have already said, that he could have passed 
 through the midst of them without losing a bit of 
 his talent and without leaving behind the flower 
 of his youth, the freshness of his soul and the 
 uprightness of his heart, especially as one remem- 
 bers that he was only twenty years old.
 
 4IO Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 He has often shared their distress, but never 
 their disorderly instinct. He was always suffi- 
 ciently in control of himself to study the reasons 
 for their lot, prevent himself from succumbing 
 to the same and visiting that deep cavern where 
 they abode without ever letting go the saving 
 clew which was to bring him back to the light, 
 but, contrary to what might have been feared, 
 bringing back from the trip new powers or those 
 which up to that moment had never been revealed. 
 
 From the very winter which followed our in- 
 stallation at Paris, we had connections in other 
 circles also. Claudius H^brard had taken us to 
 see one of the curators of the Library of the 
 Arsenal, Eugene Loudon, a writer for the Catholic 
 party, who united at his house a few friends once 
 a week in a little circle. All the arts and every 
 opinion were represented in that salon, filled as 
 early as nine o'clock in the evening with the 
 smoke of cigars, which rose slowly along the 
 shelves crammed with books, and where the time 
 was passed in noisy conversations entirely con- 
 nected with intellectual things. 
 
 This modest salon even put on the airs of a 
 conventicle; for women were absent from it and 
 the men who came there flattered themselves that 
 they were bound together by a bond which rested 
 on their sympathy in common and on the desire, 
 dear to them all, of rising higher in the world. 
 
 There we met Am6d6e Pommier, a poet of the 
 fine old style, who was already an old man, a 
 remnant from the literary battles of 1830; Vital
 
 My Brother and I. 411 
 
 Dubray, a talented sculptor, who expiated under 
 the Republic those favors with which the Empire 
 had overwhelmed him; Jules Duvaux, the mili- 
 tary painter; Augustin Largent, a sensitive soul 
 and somewhat simple, who afterwards became an 
 Oratorian monk; the two Sirouys, one of whom 
 painted, some years ago, the frescos for the palace 
 of the Legion of Honor; Develay, "dramatic 
 author," who made a boast of the fact that he 
 had never found a director of a theatre who was 
 bold enough to put his work on the stage, although 
 he had sent in to the theatres of Paris more than 
 thirty dramas in verse, fragments from which he 
 spouted forth with a tumultuous emphasis; Henri 
 de Bornier, timid and obscure, walking about 
 with La Fille de Roland, his masterpiece, in his 
 brain ; and I forget how many more. 
 
 Among these men, who were all our seniors, we 
 were mere children, especially my brother, whose 
 beardless face made him seem still younger than 
 he was. At that time he was getting his first 
 volume ready: Les Amoureuses. 
 
 It was at the Arsenal that we were able to esti- 
 mate the effect which the opening of the career of 
 such a poet and author would produce. There, 
 too, we got to know our neighbor the publisher, 
 Jules Tardieu, a poet himself, who wanted to be 
 the bringer-out of the volume; there, too, one 
 evening we saw fidouard Thierry, who, a few 
 months later, introduced my brother's work to the 
 readers of the Moniteur Officiel. 
 
 Eugene Loudon's drawing-room opened others
 
 412 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 to us. At the houses of Mme. Ancelot and 
 of Mme. Melanie Waldor and Mme. Olympe 
 Chodsko and in the drawing-room of Mme. 
 Perriere-Pilte, who exercised the function of grand 
 fashionable protectoress of letters, my brother 
 recited Les Prunes, Les Censes, Trois Jours de 
 Vendange and prologues for comedies, generously 
 pouring out the contents of a portfolio, ever filled 
 again, before lovely ladies, who were in ecstasy 
 over his elegant manners, brilliant youth, warm 
 Southern voice and seductive beauty. The pub- 
 lication of Les Amojireuses did not give the lie to 
 that impression. This charming book, published 
 by Jules Tardieu under a fine white cover deco- 
 rated in red, earned for Alphonse Daudet at once 
 the regard of men of letters and of sensitive 
 minds. 
 
 Within twenty-four hours he was ranked among 
 those beginners of whom the world says: "He's 
 somebody." fidouard Thierry devoted a long and 
 eloquent column of eulogy to him in his literary 
 feuilleton. "When Alfred de Musset died," 
 said he, "two pens were left by him at the service 
 of the man who could take them up : the pen for 
 prose and the pen for poetry. Octave Feuillet 
 inherited one of them and Alphonse Daudet has 
 just claimed heirship to the other." 
 
 The good fellow did not suspect that he would 
 have to complete that flattering appreciation later 
 
 — the spirit, if not the text of which I reproduce 
 
 — and that Alphonse Daudet would become one 
 of the first prose writers of his time.
 
 My Brother and I. 413 
 
 Nevertheless this brilliant entrance into letters 
 did not bring fortune for us with it. It bright- 
 ened the future with a ray of hope, without soften- 
 ing the anxieties of the present moment. We 
 made a fine appearance in the social world ; at 
 Augustine Brohan's house, where my brother had 
 been asked one evening, he had been taken, even 
 by the mistress of the house herself, for a Wal- 
 lach prince. But we were still living like neces- 
 sity students, having hardly anything to support 
 us save that which I made in the newspaper office. 
 We only left our garret in the Hotel du Senat to 
 climb up into another one, and there, thanks to 
 the trustfulness of a furniture dealer, furnish our 
 interior beneath the eaves of an enormous struc- 
 ture on the Rue Bonaparte, which was, however, 
 so leant up against Saint-Germain des Pr^s that 
 we were able to indulge in an illusion and believe 
 that we were living in the belfry. We had good 
 reason to fear being kept for a long time to 
 come in a life full of privations; but we were so 
 young that in sober truth the perspective was not 
 so very discouraging after all. 
 
 But a sudden change was about to take place in 
 our life and it is my duty now to tell in what new 
 conditions it was to find me.
 
 414 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 It may be remembered that on the 14th of January 
 1858 I had been attached for more than two 
 months to the staff of the Spectateiir when the 
 attempt to assassinate the emperor near the opera 
 house took place. The evening of that day our 
 political director Mallac sent to the press for ap- 
 pearance in next day's number an article consider- 
 ing this very serious event; in the course of it he 
 developed the following thesis: Only under des- 
 potic governments is it possible for the world to 
 see such crimes as that which has just been com- 
 mitted by Orsini. Despotism calls out and pro- 
 vokes revolution. Legitimate sovereigns, protected 
 by their hereditary right and the love of their 
 subjects and placed at the apex of a rigorously 
 constitutional power, have nothing to fear from 
 assassins. 
 
 The two-fold objection to this reasoning is patent 
 to every one : It is contrary to the truth of history 
 and in the circumstances that existed it exposed 
 the paper at least to a warning if not an immediate 
 suppression. 
 
 Mallac's comrades on the staff drew his atten- 
 tions to this, but he would not listen to objections.
 
 My Brother and I. 415 
 
 The business director who represented the prop- 
 erty of the paper succeeded no better. After 
 having engaged in an extremely violent discussion 
 with him, Mallac passed a good part of the night 
 at the printing office in order to be quite sure that 
 his article would be published. 
 
 Next morning when I reached the office at the 
 usual hour I found the staff there in full numbers 
 
 — members of the committee and shareholders 
 
 — the entire crowd wearing a thunderstruck ap- 
 pearance. An Imperial decree, citing with appro- 
 bation a report by Minister of the Interior Billault, 
 ordered the suppression of the Spectateiir and at 
 the same time that o{ La Revue de Paris, which at 
 that time was managed by Laurent Pichat, Louis 
 Ulbach and Maxime du Camp. 
 
 That was a hard blow for the fusionist politics 
 which the Spectateiir represented, but it was a real 
 disaster for my brother and me. I had just suc- 
 ceeded in getting permission that he should be 
 tried for the chronicle of local news and I am not 
 sure but that his first article had already been 
 written. 
 
 Luckily the disaster was overcome very soon up 
 to a certain point; L' Union fell heir to the sub- 
 scribers and the editorial staff of the suppressed 
 paper. So it came about that I was turned over 
 to the legitimist paper, with my salary, it is true, 
 very notably decreased. " We are poor," they 
 told me, " but we have enough to procure daily 
 bread for us all." 
 
 I stayed there for some months and then I was
 
 4i6 Alphonse Daudei, 
 
 asked to go to Blois to replace for a time the 
 editor-in-chief of the France Centrale. When I 
 came back my place was taken and they never 
 returned it to me. I felt a very lively indignation at 
 that ; I was twenty- two years old and had a great 
 deal of ambition and the strongest will to help 
 reconstruct the ruined hearth. But it was not by 
 dying of hunger in the service of a party which 
 did not know how to keep even young men with 
 it; nor was it by writing the memoirs of an old 
 nobleman, chamberlain to Charles X, whose secre- 
 tary I had become, that I could make my designs 
 and plans real. The Empire was in full prosperity 
 and inspired no repugnance whatever in me. Not 
 having known the horrors of the coup d'Hat, I 
 was not able to share the rancors felt by the 
 conquered. An entire generation, which has 
 cruelly expiated its error and its inexperience 
 since then, believed at that time the very thing that 
 I myself was thinking. 
 
 So it came about that I knocked at the door of 
 Vicomte de la Gueronniere who at that time 
 directed the matters of the press at the Ministry 
 of the Interior. I was received most charmingly 
 by that amiable man, who would have left a deep 
 trace in the history of his country if his character 
 had been equal to his talent. I told him my situ- 
 ation and a few days afterwards he sent me to 
 Privas to take the editorship of the Echo de V Ar- 
 dhhe, promising to recall me very soon. 
 
 Privas after Paris ! A lowly provincial news- 
 paper after one of the great organs of the French
 
 My Brother and I. 417 
 
 press — what a fall ! And then, what a sorrow at 
 leaving my brother ! Still, it was necessary to be 
 resigned and I left, buoyed up by the hope of 
 returning and also consoled because this banish- 
 ment from Paris was bringing me nearer to my 
 mother who was still at Nimes, and to another 
 person very dear to my heart who a little while 
 after was to bear my name. 
 
 It was while at Privas that I heard of the begin- 
 nings made by Alphonse Daudet in Le Figaro. I 
 had known Villemessant during my short stay in 
 Blois whither he often came, and having been asked 
 to stay a couple of days at Chambon, his fine prop- 
 erty, I had talked to him of my brother, whom he 
 very soon learned to know and whose qualities he 
 quickly estimated at their worth. It was a great 
 happiness to all. The Figaro was a sort of conse- 
 cration for an author, a brevet accorded to talent 
 and the doors of the editors opened wide. 
 
 My brother began his fame there, first with 
 chronicles in verse and prose-studies and dialogue 
 scenes : Le Roman du Chaperon Rouge, Les Ros- 
 signols du Cimeiiere, L' Amour Trompette — then 
 longer stories there and in other places, continued 
 for several years, which in their briefness were 
 impressed with so sweet a charm that they created 
 for him who wrote them a position quite apart in 
 contemporary literature, even before he dreamt of 
 writing books of long-continued efifort. 
 
 These fine literary bits which are worthy of 
 standing in some classical collection may be read 
 to-day in his Lettres dc mon Moulin, and in his
 
 4^^ Alp house Daudet. 
 
 Contes du Lundi, as well as in Robert Helmont} in 
 Femmes d^ Artistes and in his Lettres a nn Absent. 
 They are compounded at one and the same time 
 of imagination and historical fact and bear in 
 the highest degree the mark that reveals his state 
 of mind at the time when they were written. 
 
 In one he permits his imagination to flutter 
 hither and thither across fields and gambol ac- 
 cording to its caprice beneath the sunshine and 
 through the warm air of the South, all balmy with 
 the fragrance of the pines to which he listens as 
 they sound above the wild rocks of Provence. 
 
 In another he recalls the memories of his voy- 
 ages, in the course of which he has looked upon 
 men and things with that mysterious glance of his 
 and that certainty in his mind, clever to question 
 and observe them ; and then in a third he allows 
 his soul, torn with patriotic anguish or bursting 
 with a holy indignation, to explode at the spectacle 
 of the misfortunes of his country. Laughter and 
 weeping— upon that harmonious board the gamut 
 is complete and all the notes are present. 
 
 There too are some of the works in their germs 
 which he wrote later: L ArUsienne, Le Nabab, 
 Jack; they will be found there in a thousand 
 scattered parts in their first and summary form, 
 just as they were seen by him at first before the 
 labor undertaken by his mind had drawn their 
 lines exact and arranged their development. 
 
 The success of these studies, which hardly had 
 
 1 Robert Helmont is now published alone without the other 
 stories.
 
 My Brother and I. 419 
 
 anything analogous to them in French literature 
 before their day, was very lively. Echoes of it 
 reached me in my distant exile, where my brother 
 corroborated them later on when he came to pass 
 a few weeks with me and where he brought me a 
 great piece of nev/s, as if to prove to me that, after 
 all, life was beginning to smile upon us. Having 
 had the chance of meeting Comte de Morny, that 
 notable person, the most powerful of the powerful 
 at that period, charmed by his talent, had prom- 
 ised him an office in the Bureau of the President 
 of the Corps Legislatif, one of those places which 
 the great lords of a bygone day had created for 
 the benefit of poor men of letters and which per- 
 mitted such men to work freely, unhampered by 
 the vexations of material support. As soon as he 
 returned to Paris my brother was to take posses- 
 sion of it. 
 
 " But I am a Legitimist " he had proudly objected 
 when he heard the kindly offer of his new pro- 
 tector; and what should the other do but answer 
 laughingly : 
 
 " The Empress is more Legitimist than you ! " 
 That is all I shall say of the relations between 
 Alphonse Daudet and M. de Morny, since I do 
 not care to take the edge off that part of my 
 brother's memoirs which he will devote to it. 
 The certainty of being protected by him aroused 
 our hopes and caused us to look into the future 
 through very rosy spectacles. My brother's stay 
 at Privas was charged with this feeling of confi- 
 dence ; we passed some delightful vacations there
 
 420 Alphonse Datidet. 
 
 and together made long excursions into the moun- 
 tains ; then he left me to go to Nimes, from which 
 town he departed for Provence to stay in the 
 hospitable house at Fontvieille, whence the first 
 of the letters " de mon moulin " might well be 
 dated. 
 
 During this trip it was that he learned to know 
 Frederic Mistral, Theodore Aubanel, Roumanille 
 and all the F^libres, and connected himself with 
 them by a friendship which time has never shaken. 
 Returning to Paris he proceeded to take his 
 place in the office of the President of the Corps 
 Legislatif. 
 
 From that moment on my looks were constantly 
 fixed upon the Palais-Bourbon ; I was dying of 
 ennui at Privas and was resolved that I should 
 not stay there much longer ; moreover my brother 
 had promised me to help shorten my stay. Just 
 at that moment an occasion offered itself to him 
 to keep his promise and he seized upon it. 
 
 At that time the Imperial Government was pre- 
 paring the grand reforms which were to be applied 
 at the beginning of 1861 ; a certain amount of 
 liberty was about to be allowed the Chamber. 
 M. de Morny, as President of the Corps Legislatif, 
 octupied himself with an increase of the number 
 of secretaries whose duty it was to edit the reports 
 of the debates. He had two positions in his gift; 
 for one of them he had already chosen Ludovic 
 Halevy, who was giving a prelude in modest essays 
 to his brilliant career as a dramatic author; my 
 brother proposed me for the other and made me
 
 My Brother and I. 421 
 
 accept it at the very moment when, without wait- 
 ing for him to call me, I had just arrived again in 
 Paris, urged on by a presentiment of my good 
 fortune. 
 
 " The President wants to know you," said he to 
 me one evening; "he will receive you to-morrow 
 morning at seven o'clock." 
 
 You may imagine that I was on time. A cab 
 deposited me before the wide terrace in front of 
 the President's palace exactly at seven o'clock. 
 Having a conviction that the great personages in 
 this world are not to be approached save in 
 evening dress and white necktie, I had dressed 
 myself as I did on the day of my first trip about 
 Paris. It was November and not very light; my 
 dress did not produce any effect whatever upon 
 the presidential vestibule, or rather it produced 
 a very deplorable one, for it was not until after 
 I had mentioned my name that the messengers 
 deigned to be polite. One of them conducted me 
 into the " Chinese drawing-room " and asked me 
 to wait. 
 
 It was a marvel, that drawing-room, with all its 
 collections — carved ivories and jades, pot-bellied 
 bronzes, junks and pagodas in minature, wonder- 
 ful monsters, squatted dogs and screens covered 
 with gold and embroideries ! But the trouble was 
 that they forgot me there. One o'clock arrived 
 and I had not obtained my reception. My stomach 
 cried cupboard ; I walked from the window to the 
 chimney and from the chimney to the window, 
 overwhelmed by impatience, worn out and my
 
 42 2 Alphonse Daudet, 
 
 underclothes sticking to me through the exercise 
 I had had in trying all the furniture for a seat. 
 
 Finally, worn out and at the end of my resources, 
 there came a time when I stationed myself before 
 a mirror in order to " repair the disorder of my 
 dress." As I was engaged in this somewhat deli- 
 cate operation with all the coolness of a man who 
 knows that nobody is remembering his existence, 
 suddenly a door opened. Much abashed I threw 
 my overcoat across my unbuttoned waistcoat — 
 but I was already alone once more, after having 
 seen a stream of silken gown, the profile of a 
 blonde lady and the smoke of a cigarette pass 
 across my vision. Afterwards I learned that it 
 was Mme. de Morny. She notified her husband. 
 
 He came in hastily in his close-fitting blue velvet 
 coat, with his black skull-cap upon his bald head. 
 
 " Who are you — what are you doing there? " 
 
 I gave him my name. 
 
 " Oh, my poor boy, I entirely forgot you. . . . 
 Well, your brother has talked to me about you ; 
 you wish to be secretary-editor and it seems that 
 political affairs are familiar to you. You are nom- 
 inated ; go and see M. Valette the secretary- 
 general ; he will present you to M. Denis de 
 Lagarde, your chief. . . ." 
 
 My audience did not last three minutes, but I 
 never forgot my long wait, for it had brought me 
 good fortune. I only had to go downstairs to the 
 entresol to find my brother and announce the 
 success of his efforts. He lived there side by 
 side with Ernest I'Epine, who at that time man-
 
 My Brothei'- a7id L 423 
 
 aged M. de Morny's office, and in the midst of 
 these serious occupations, pleasantly broken by 
 artistic junketings, prepared the future successes 
 for his supremely clever Quatrelles. At that very 
 time, along with Alphonse Daudet, he was consider- 
 ing those plans of collaboration v/hich were real- 
 ized successively in La Derniere I dole, L'CEillet 
 Blanc and Lc Fr^re Ai/i/. 
 
 Notwithstanding the success which these plays 
 obtained, this kind of collaboration could never 
 persuade Alphonse Daudet of the efficaciousness 
 of a combined labor of two persons, when it was a 
 question of literary work. He has remained con- 
 vinced that notwithstanding the conscientiousness 
 of two writers harnessed to the same book or the 
 same play, when the time comes to reap the moral 
 harvest of their joint work, there is always one 
 who is disillusioned, and therefore since that time 
 he has renounced every attempt with the same 
 thought. It is true he has called upon the kind 
 services of his literary comrades when he has 
 wished to make a play out of Fromojit Jeune 
 et Risler Ahiif in the first place, and from Le Nabab 
 afterwards ; but in these cases it was only a ques- 
 tion of arranging scenes which were already in 
 existence, somewhat after the fashion of " enlarge- 
 ment," a placing of things in the proper focus 
 where the part assigned to the collaborator was 
 too small for a possibility that any doubt could 
 arise concerning the real paternity of the success 
 of the work. 
 
 My true existence as a Parisian, a man of letters
 
 424 Alphonse Datidet. 
 
 and journalist, dates from my entrance into the 
 Corps L^gislatif. The sessions were short, for 
 they lasted only three or four months, and they 
 allowed me leisure which was entirely devoted to 
 my labors with the pen. 
 
 Some day I intend to relate what I can recall 
 from that journey of twenty years through the 
 world of politics and the press. I only want to 
 allude to it here in order to recall one episode in 
 my life which my brother knew nothing about and 
 which I would not have spoken of, had not people 
 associated it with him later in connection with his 
 novel Le Nabab. 
 
 In 1863 I had been for two years in the Corps 
 L6gislatif A correspondent for two big provincial 
 newspapers, I also belonged to the editorial staff 
 of La France, which was managed at that time by 
 the Vicomte de la Gueronniere, a paper in which 
 I had just started the " parliamentary echoes." 
 My name had already gained a certain notoriety ; 
 a favorable wind filled my sails; the paternal 
 hearth had been built anew and my own was ris- 
 ing; it was one of the happiest moments of my 
 Hfe. 
 
 Whilst the general elections which took place 
 that year were being held, I happened to be at 
 Nimes during the vacation. One of my friends 
 took me to see the Nabob, that is to say, Francois 
 Bravay. He had just come from Egypt and was 
 presenting himself to the electors in one of the 
 electoral districts of the Gard. In order to make 
 a success of his running he had promised the peo-
 
 My Brother and L 425 
 
 pie of that part of France an irrigation canal which 
 was to render their soil fertile, a soil which is ren- 
 dered sterile through lack of water. 
 
 At a later period this promise was judged by 
 the Corps Legislatif to be an electoral trick and 
 the memory of it always cast an unfavorable 
 shadow upon Francois Bravay, even after he had 
 been elected for the third time in succession and 
 forced the gates of the Palais Bourbon, though 
 his other two elections had been declared invalid. 
 Nevertheless that promise had been sincere. He 
 had given it due effect by spending a million 
 francs in good ringing money to meet the expenses 
 of the first work on the canal. He knew my rela- 
 tions with the Paris journals and asked me to 
 support his candidacy. 
 
 Then, when he was elected and borne onward 
 to the chamber by the enthusiasm of the people 
 whom his generosity and reputation as a million- 
 aire had excited, aided as he was by a fervent 
 speech as rude as his own personality, but very 
 well suited to be understood by " the rural," he 
 suggested that I should become his political secre- 
 tary. I accepted the position and have never had 
 reason to regret it. 
 
 I have never known a more upright heart than 
 his. One of my regrets has been that I did not 
 possess the necessary influence to enforce my 
 own advice and make him understand how worth- 
 less some of the people were who surrounded him. 
 His constant trips to Egypt and the confusion of 
 his life, forever worried by beggars on the one side
 
 426 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 and the need of money created by their demands 
 on the other, caused my activity in his case to 
 be too often a mere sinecure. But as long as he 
 remained a deputy he never drew my attention to 
 the fact and he always remembered the ardor with 
 which I had embraced his interests. Among all 
 my friends he is one of those to whom I am most 
 passionately devoted and I have never ceased to 
 believe that he was worthy of inspiring that affec- 
 tion. His misfortune had been, while springing 
 from a very low origin, to have enriched himself 
 too quickly by those means which are familiar to 
 men who have gone to the Orient to make their 
 fortune, and to have returned to France without 
 any knowledge either of Paris or of the new 
 surroundings in which he was called upon to live, 
 where, for that very reason indeed, he was certain 
 to ruin himself just as quickly as he had 
 obtained wealth in the East. The portrait which 
 my brother has traced of this man in an unforget- 
 table book leaves nothing for me to add, unless it 
 be that when he speaks of the exquisite kindliness 
 of that perfectly simple soul, notwithstanding all 
 appearances to the contrary, the author of Le 
 Nabab exaggerated nothing. In the eyes of those 
 who have known and loved Francois Bravay the 
 novel of which he is the hero is the best work 
 in the world to raise a monument to his memory 
 and to avenge him for clumsy calumnies. To con- 
 vince oneself of this it is only necessary to read 
 the last paragraph : " His lips moved gently and 
 his dilated eyes, turning toward de Gery, were filled
 
 My Brother and I. 427 
 
 before death came with a mournful expression. 
 They looked imploring and yet disgusted, as if 
 he wished to cite him as a witness to one of the 
 greatest and cruellest injustices that Paris has ever 
 committed." 
 
 How was it possible, therefore, that a calculated 
 malice should have attempted to make people be- 
 lieve that all those eloquent pages constituted an 
 insult to his memory, so that at one moment the 
 relatives of Francois Bravay actually shared the 
 unjust belief? I have not yet been able to under- 
 stand it. 
 
 But what is much more serious is the fact that 
 they wished to prove that my brother committed 
 an act of black ingratitude. At the time when he 
 had to defend himself against this charge he begged 
 me not to interfere ; that literary quarrel being 
 entirely personal and foreign to the intrinsic merit 
 of his work, it was too wounding to his literary 
 delicacy that he should have wished to complicate 
 it by intervention from my side. 
 
 But to-day I have recovered freedom to say that 
 Alphonse Daudet was engaged to Francois Bravay 
 by no bond of recollection which stood in the way 
 of his right as a novelist. He had hardly seen 
 him more than two or three times, and although 
 that sudden and passing sight of him had been 
 enough to give him an impression of the man and 
 his surroundings, completed as the picture was by 
 what he already knew of him and what he learned 
 afterward, that could not be compared in any way 
 to one of those services which condemns to silence
 
 428 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 the man who has received them. So my brother 
 could write Le Nabab, for even I myself, if I had 
 had the talent to make it what it is, I would have 
 written and signed it without thinking that I was 
 false to any duty.
 
 My Brother a^td I. 429 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 During the year 1 86 1 my brother's health, which 
 had been shaken by the violent attacks upon the 
 nerves that life in Paris brings, was pretty seriously 
 affected. Dr. Marchal de Calvi, a great friend of 
 letters and men of letters, had him under his charge 
 and surrounded him with anxious care and atten- 
 tions just as a gardener would cherish some rare 
 flower. When winter approached he declared to 
 him up and down that he must leave the city and 
 go in search of health to the country of the sun 
 light, because that was the only means to avoid 
 compromising the future irrevocably. His verdict 
 was formal and my brother obeyed, leaving for 
 Algiers, where he passed several months. 
 
 He has often told me of the details of that trip 
 which left a profound impression upon his spirit 
 and his works ; his stay in Algiers and his excur- 
 sions into the country parts and visits to Arab 
 chiefs, his long rides through the mountains upon' 
 a mule which carried strapped to its neck a flask 
 full of a certain oil made forsooth of the liver of 
 the cod, powerful doses of which he was called 
 upon to swallow. 
 
 But of all the treatment which had been ordered 
 for him he observed scarcely a single one except
 
 430 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 that. As to the one which ordered him to rest 
 absolutely, he observed that by over-doing every- 
 thing and spending his strength by running to the 
 right and left, seeking sensations, joyous at new 
 discoveries, observing and writing down every even- 
 ing his impressions of the day on those little note- 
 books he has been collecting for twenty years, in 
 which his entire past and future work will be found 
 in embryo. 
 
 " In these note-books," said he in the preface to 
 Fromont Jeune et Risler Aini,'' there is sometimes 
 nothing but a skimped line for remarks and for 
 thoughts — something to recall to me a gesture or 
 intonation which may be developed and augmented 
 later to complete the harmony of some important 
 work. At Paris as well as on journeys and in the 
 country these memorandum books have become 
 blackened with lines without a thought, even with- 
 out thinking of the future work which was piling 
 up in them ; proper names sometimes are met with 
 there which I have not been able to change because 
 I find in proper names a kind of physiognomy, an 
 impress very Hke the people who bear them." 
 
 When my brother returned from Algiers in the 
 spring his health gave us no more disquiet, al- 
 though it demanded a good deal of care, but his 
 note-books were teeming with a multitude of pre- 
 cious memoranda. A charming study of Mihanah 
 which has found a place in Lettres de Mon Moulin, 
 a story called Kadour et Katel in the first edition 
 of Robert He/mont, as well as Un Decori du Quinze 
 Aoi)t, and Namoun the little Arab in Le Sacrifice,
 
 My Brother and I. 431 
 
 and finally the immortal Tartariti de Tarascon — • 
 all these Alphonse Daudet brought back from 
 Algiers, a rich booty, as one can sec, in which no 
 account is taken of the visions of the sun, land- 
 scapes and blue skies, whose fruitful light has 
 remained luminous in his memory. 
 
 During his absence the Od^on theatre had 
 played his Dcrnitrc Idole, that play in one act 
 which he wrote conjointly with Ernest I'tlpine. 
 Just as my brother left for Algiers the rehearsals 
 of his play were about to begin ; his collaborator 
 was to have directed them, but he fell ill at the 
 same time and I had the task of following them up. 
 Tisserant, who played the principal character, had 
 undertaken to place it on the stage ; Mdlle. Rous- 
 seil made her debut in the character of handsome 
 Madame Ambroy, and although a one-act piece 
 was in question, the theatre expected a success. 
 
 Our common hopes were indeed by no means 
 dashed and those who were present at the first 
 night would be able to recall the fact. If I call 
 for their testimony it is only to prove that I exag- 
 gerate nothing. The old authors tossed their 
 heads, saying: "It isn't the drama!" But they 
 applauded all the same ; I can still see Paul de 
 Saint-Victor seated in his box and applauding with 
 his hands. 
 
 The audience was one of the most brilliant. It 
 was understood that M. de Morny was interested 
 in the two authors, and there he was, somewhat 
 surprised at the warm applause from the public, 
 without understanding very well those scenes re-
 
 432 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 plete with emotion, yet such as to draw tears from 
 the most skeptical ; but his wife, carried away by 
 delight, broke her fan while applauding. The very 
 next day I sent the news of the success to my 
 brother ; it reached him deep in the interior of I 
 know not what far-distant country. Since then he 
 has told me that in the midst of the incidents of 
 his splendid journey the news left him entirely 
 cold, so small, far-distant and forgotten did Paris 
 seem to him at that moment. 
 
 The following year Marchal de Calvi insisted 
 again that he must leave at the approach of the 
 frost and this time he went to Corsica. There 
 very different emotions awaited him. Traces can 
 be found in his short stories — read Marie Anto, 
 Le Phare des Sanguinaires, V Agonie de la S^mil- 
 lante — and last, not least, Le Nabab, in which his 
 remembrances of Ajaccio have clearly had their 
 influence on the financial combinations of the 
 rascal Paganetti and the electoral scenes re- 
 counted by Paul de Gery. 
 
 After two winters passed in this fashion far from 
 Paris my brother was able to take up again his 
 old way of living, for the warm air of the South 
 was no longer indispensable to him. It was merely 
 prudence which suggested the idea of leaving again 
 at the end of 1863. But he stopped short in Pro- 
 vence ; his stay there was full of hard work ; it is 
 enough to read his books to convince one of that. 
 
 From that epoch on belongs more especially the 
 period when the South and Southerners entered into 
 his work, for that was the time when he studied
 
 My Brother and I. 433 
 
 them in their landscapes, their social life and their 
 customs, filling out his daily observations with the 
 recollections drawn from the past, adapting a char- 
 acteristic found living in some person whom he met 
 there or elsewhere, making himself the historian 
 of the fashions and habits of a race just as others 
 have made themselves the historians of the events 
 of a country. 
 
 In pursuance of his method of describing noth- 
 ing but what he had seen, never relating anything 
 but what had happened to him and of taking 
 everything from reality — stories, descriptions and 
 characters — every new discovery which he made 
 in the course of human adventures, every inner 
 event which played itself off under his own eyes 
 are just so many sources which sooner or later will 
 be sure to enrich his intellectual domain. I am 
 much inclined to believe that it was particularly 
 during the period of his sojourn in Provence that 
 he took the measure of the fruitful power of this 
 procedure and when he definitely laid down for 
 himself the rule which he has rigorously observed 
 ever since. 
 
 What literary wealth does he not owe to that 
 severe discipline of his mind ! It has given actu- 
 ality and modernity to his books, which is as much 
 as saying it has given one of the conditions for 
 success in a social fabric carried away by its thirst 
 for enjoyment, burnt as if with fever, which has no 
 longer any time to reflect and turn the mind upon 
 the days which are already past — a society that 
 is all the while tormented by the desire of seeing 
 
 28
 
 434 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 itself live again in works of fiction which shall 
 translate its passions, virtues and vices, which shall 
 teach people to understand themselves without 
 ever imposing any obligation of studying them- 
 selves or what relates to them. 
 
 It is quite true that a special organization is 
 needed to put this system into action with good 
 results, a flame of personal energy, a gift from 
 nature which the most laborious efforts can never 
 add to one who did not find it in his cradle, 
 l^mile Zola, making an estimate of Alphonse 
 Daudet's talent, wrote some time ago: "Kindly 
 nature has placed him in that delightful border- 
 land where poetry ends and reality commences." 
 There we have the principal cause of the literary 
 good fortune of my brother concisely defined. 
 
 But in order to understand the long strides 
 which he has made toward renown since that time, 
 it is necessary to take some account of that cease- 
 less labor of his mind of which I just spoke and of 
 his ambition which ever turned its face toward 
 betterment. Notwithstanding these natural gifts 
 he might have lingered on the way, if he had not 
 constantly stimulated and developed them, refin- 
 ing them through his tenacious will, never weary, 
 always ready to exert his strength in order to 
 make the work of his hand more perfect. 
 
 Events that happened at the close of the Em- 
 pire, the anguish felt at the siege of Paris, the 
 tragedies under the Commune and all those start- 
 ling episodes which seem to be part and parcel of 
 our individual history because they have weighed
 
 My Brother a)id I. 435 
 
 so greatly on the destiny of each of us, were sure 
 to inspire and in fact did inspire more than one 
 author. Novelists and poets have made use of 
 those incidents, referring to them in their verses 
 or including them in the framework of the plots 
 in their stories. How does it happen that no- 
 where are they more living than in the pages 
 which Alphonse Daudet has devoted to them? 
 Just exactly because he related them as a realist 
 and as a poet besides. The flame of his talent has 
 gilded reality and not only clothed it with all the 
 graces of an original and penetrating style, but 
 lent it the accent of an infinite tenderness which 
 starts the tears. And in fact the most ordinary 
 trait, when it is touched by this master workman, 
 becomes a jewel rare. 
 
 Would you like an example of the eflfect which 
 he could produce by the simplest means? Open 
 the Contes dn Lundi and re-read La Dernikre 
 Classe. The scene is a poor Alsatian village on 
 the day when, submitting to the conqueror, the 
 French province is about to become a German 
 one. The teacher is giving his lesson for the last 
 time in French -- he has asked in the parents of 
 his pupils in order to make his farewell to them 
 and at the same time on that day of mourning 
 call them to witness to his ardent love for the 
 conquered fatherland, as well as sow in their souls 
 before he leaves them that seed of patriotism 
 whose flowers they may leave as heritages to their 
 children. A little schoolboy who had come to 
 school that day just the same as every day relates
 
 43^ Alpkonse Datcdet. 
 
 the scene, and that is all — hardly more than a 
 trifling event which the newspaper of the adjacent 
 town perhaps might have placed in its columns of 
 local news ! 
 
 Now observe what that unimportant fact be- 
 comes under the pen of Alphonse Daudet With- 
 out adding a single thing except the emotion that 
 fills his soul and the magic of his style, without 
 uttering a single noisy word or one of those some- 
 what coarse sayings which are like an eternal 
 menace of reprisals hereafter in the speeches of 
 the conquered to the victor, statements which he 
 would have been very excusable to have used in 
 the circumstances, he has written eight pages with- 
 out overstepping the tone of a cool narrative — 
 eight pages which form the most eloquent protest 
 which has ever been raised against a barbarous 
 law that treats a people like so much cattle. 
 
 If one desires to look through his works for 
 other proofs of that so personal a gift of causing 
 reality to live again in his stories, without allowing 
 a bit of its power to be lost, but on the contrary 
 through the art of arranging words giving it the 
 saliency of life, they can be found by hundreds. 
 
 I will take the death of the Due de Morny. 
 My brother was present ; hour after hour he fol- 
 lowed that intimate drama which the important 
 place held by the dying man was about to trans- 
 form into a drama of history. He saw sickness 
 enter the palace and death clinging to the walls 
 covered with black hangings. He has caught 
 from the very life the fright of the politicians and
 
 My Brother and I. 437 
 
 phrase-mongers, in whose eyes the event took on 
 the proportions of a catastrophe. He Hstened to 
 the comments of the lackeys, torn between the 
 pride of having served so powerful a master, regret 
 at losing him and haste to find some destiny or 
 lot elsewhere. He assisted in destroying the in- 
 timate papers and a voluminous correspondence, 
 witnesses to the baseness of human beings, which 
 the dead man did not wish to leave behind him. 
 He entered the room of death at the very moment 
 when the embalmer left it. Every one of those 
 touches which he collected as they occurred went 
 into the note-books to enlarge the materials of the 
 novelist. 
 
 Now take the pages of Le Nabab in which he 
 has remolded that striking picture for which there 
 is a first sketch in Robert Hclmont (first edition). 
 Though you had opened the book supposing it a 
 work of pure imagination, though you were en- 
 tirely ignorant of modern history to the point of 
 ignoring the fact that it contains the truth, yet you 
 would not be able to read that chapter, between 
 the white of whose lines sarcasm peeps out, sarcasm 
 aroused in the mind of the story-teller by such ex- 
 amples of the vanity and impotence of men, with- 
 out divining that the death which he relates was 
 also the symptom which foreruns a terrible fall, 
 that it was not merely some imperial duke who 
 was disappearing from the scene, but the whole of 
 an enormous edifice which was beginning to crum- 
 ble to its fall. The exactness with which things 
 seen are reproduced when not a single political
 
 43^ Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 allusion can be met with, the life which the painter 
 has given them, the art with which he has intro- 
 duced into his account all those looks of anguish 
 whose trace he has caught upon all those fright- 
 ened faces, are quite sufficient to reveal that which 
 he did not say. Produced by such simple means, 
 the effect remains most striking. In works of art 
 that is the true mark of talent, by which I mean 
 the talent which assures their lasting quality. 
 
 i
 
 My Brother and I. 439 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 The death of the Due de Morny decided my 
 brother to carry out a project he had debated 
 for a long time, the project of recovering his lib- 
 erty. He was indeed actually too much of a man 
 of letters to persist in living otherwise than by his 
 pen when the first difficulty had once been mas- 
 tered. As soon as it appeared that the indepen- 
 dence of his ideas might be compromised thereby 
 he left the Corps L^gislatif 
 
 Is it necessary to add that during the stay which 
 he made in that office he never either wrote a line 
 cr performed an act which could be considered in 
 the light of a sacrifice of that same independence 
 to the demands of his situation? Throughout his 
 entire life he has had the good fortune of living 
 detached from every sort of political bond. " I 
 am a Legitimist " he had said to M. de Morny 
 when he entered his office for the first time. That 
 little bit of a Southerner's boasting was less a 
 truth, even at that time, than it was a manifestation 
 of native pride and perchance the homage paid 
 by him to opinions which had been professed in 
 his father's house. But my brother would not say 
 such a thing as that to-day.
 
 440 Alphonse Dmidet. 
 
 And this, not because he has had time or indeed 
 the will since then to form for himself a very clear 
 feeling of the kind of government which is best 
 fitted to France ; it was disdain of politics. He 
 expressed that disdain one day in indignant terms 
 in the epilogue to Robert Helmont (first edition). 
 
 " O politics, how I hate you ! I hate you be- 
 cause you are coarse, unjust, noisy and babbling; 
 because you are the enemy of art and of labor ; 
 because you serve as a label for every kind of folly, 
 for all sorts of ambitions and for lazinesses of every 
 variety. Blind and passionate, you separate hon- 
 est hearts which were made to be united. And on 
 the contrary you knit together individuals who are 
 in every respect unlike each other. You are the 
 great solvent of consciences, you teach the custom 
 of lying and of subterfuges, and thanks to you we 
 see honest people becoming the friends of knaves 
 as long as they are both members of the same 
 party. And in especial do I hate you, O pol- 
 itics, because you have reached the point of kill- 
 ing in our hearts all feeling and idea for our 
 country. . . " 
 
 After having read that virulent apostrophe it 
 might seem rather difficult to classify my brother 
 in one party or another, notwithstanding the 
 friendships which he may have otherwise made to 
 right and left among the admirers of his talent 
 or to believe that he desired to classify himself 
 under any mark or label. Too often had he rea- 
 son to congratulate himself on that happy inde- 
 pendence to be disposed to depart from it.
 
 My Brother and I. 441 
 
 There is more than one man to-day who regrets 
 he did not follow his example. Without profess- 
 ing as he did a disdain of politics pushed to the 
 point of hatred and whilst recognizing that the 
 misfortunes of the French have their origin espe- 
 cially in an indifference to politics felt in former 
 ages, still, it must be confessed that the farther we 
 get along, the less do men of letters and sensitive 
 natures feel that they can congratulate themselves 
 on having plunged into the hurly-burly of our cur- 
 rent quarrels. If one conquers, the harvest is 
 envy; if conquered, injustice. Most implacable of 
 all are political resentments. 
 
 I know something about it, I who consider my- 
 self a passionate lover of liberty and have never 
 proved a traitor, and yet whom certain men have 
 never forgiven the modest share which I had in 
 the perhaps inexpedient but rigorously legal act 
 of the Twenty-fourth of May. In 1876, when the 
 verdict at the polls proved conclusively to us that 
 we had been mistaken, it was all in vain that I 
 voluntarily resigned the functions which I was per- 
 forming ; it was all in vain that when my friends 
 invited me to take them up again at the Sixteenth 
 of May, I refused the offer; in vain for me to 
 abstain since that time from any systematic belit- 
 tling of a government whose defenders I had 
 attacked in quite other circumstances — the men 
 I speak of have never laid down their arms, but 
 have continued to treat me as a foe, although I 
 never provoked either their goodwill or their 
 anger.
 
 442 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 They have not even spared my literary works, 
 concerning which certain members of their set 
 wrote while speaking of me : " Daudet ! — not the 
 one who has some talent,, the other — " believing 
 that they were aiming a profound blow at my self- 
 respect through that malicious reference to the 
 successes won by my brother. The serenity with 
 which I express myself to-day may prove to them 
 how greatly they have been mistaken ; I only 
 allude to it in order to show the implacability of 
 resentments which are born of politics, from which 
 Alphonse Daudet has escaped. 
 
 Left at length entirely to himself, he devoted 
 himself absolutely to letters. Then began that 
 long series of stories, comedies, dramas and 
 novels which have consecrated his fame as step by 
 step they marked the persevering rise of his 
 talents. Successively he published the Letters 
 from My Mill, a collection made up of his impres- 
 sions in the South, Le Petit Chose, partly inspired 
 by our childhood, which he wrote in midwinter at 
 a modest farm in Languedoc where he lived alone 
 like a hermit for several weeks, having an old copy 
 of Montaigne as his only companion, the reading 
 of which rested him after his laborious watches. 
 He had U (Billet Blanc played at the Theatre 
 Francais, Les Absents at the Opera-Comique and 
 Le Frkre A in^ and Le Sacrifice at the Vaudeville. 
 
 In the course of his halts in the world of theatres 
 he reaped a rich harvest of notes and observations 
 upon actors, filling his barn with the fruitful corn 
 from which later the character of Delobelle in
 
 My Brother and /. 443 
 
 Fromont Jeiine et Risler Ain^ was to spring, as 
 well as the critical appreciations which one can 
 still read in a collection of his dramatic criticisms 
 from VOfficiely through which he has scattered 
 the leading chapters of a history of theatrical 
 criticism. 
 
 Speaking of this part of his life work, I have 
 often heard people express astonishment that his 
 plays did not meet with the same favor from the 
 public as his books. It is quite true that he has 
 never carried off one of those victories of the 
 boards which afford fortune to an author of a 
 theatre. I am not speaking of the plays which 
 he adapted from his novels; the latter came upon 
 the boards protected by the memory of the 
 resounding success which they had had in their 
 earlier form, though sometimes even this remem- 
 brance was a weight upon rather than a service to 
 them, particularly when the public did not find on 
 the stage in their fullness and set within their de- 
 scriptive framework those individual types which 
 had charmed it the most. As to the others, with 
 the exception perhaps of La Dernih-c Idole, they 
 have usually given their author more expense than 
 satisfaction. 
 
 In this undeniable fact I am almost tempted to 
 see a proof of his superiority, or, if you prefer, the 
 inferiority of the scenic art. The books of 
 Alphonse Daudet owe their greatest attraction 
 more especially to the details, to descriptions, 
 analysis of events and the composition of the cast 
 of characters, to I know not what personal, original
 
 444 Alphonse Da,udet, 
 
 and seductive quality which theatrical conventions 
 piteously destroy. His best qualities are exactly 
 contrary to those which the modern boards exact, 
 where conversation means little and the fact 
 brought forth is of value only through the manner 
 whereby it catches the observation and interest of 
 the spectator. 
 
 On a single occasion only has my brother been 
 tempted to write a drama suited to the taste of the 
 day and in a form which allowed no room for his 
 poetical expansiveness. He allowed himself to be 
 got around by theatrical people and produced 
 Lisc Tavernier and he came to grief It may be 
 alleged that the play was put in the most grotesque 
 fashion on the stage ; at the Ambigu Theatre we 
 were still under the management of Billion in 1872 
 — which says everything; but even if it had been 
 put on the stage by a director who was more . 
 anxious to uphold the dignity of art, I do not 
 believe that it would have produced a better 
 result. 
 
 Toward the end of that year Alphonse Daudet 
 gave the measure of what he was able to do for the 
 theatre with L Arlhiennc. This tragic idyl he has 
 clothed in the most brilliant decorations ; he has 
 touched all its periods with the hand of love, as if 
 they were the stanzas of a pastoral poem ; in the 
 scenery drawn from Provence he has caused the 
 entire gamut of passion to sound. From the ver)^ 
 day when he began that work he had a fever, and 
 that fever did not cease until the evening of the first 
 performance in the lassitude and disappointment
 
 My Brother and I. 445 
 
 which a doubtful victory brought with it. In 
 every sentence he scattered profusely the finest 
 pearls his wallet contained ; he has written pages 
 in that work which you cannot read without feeling 
 your soul oppressed by a poignant emotion. 
 
 Nevertheless the effect on the boards did not 
 answer his expectations. Is it because the action 
 is too local? Is it because Mireille had exhausted 
 the interest felt by Parisians for things of Provence? 
 Or is it because V Arlhienne would have had an- 
 other destiny upon some other stage than that of 
 the Vaudeville, in some other atmosphere than that 
 of the corner of the Chaussee d'Antin, so fero- 
 ciously cynical? I am well disposed to believe it, 
 for but little was lacking and the uncertain success 
 of the play, sufficient as it was to do honor to an 
 author's career, would have transformed itself into 
 an incontestable triumph.
 
 446 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 I AM editing these notes somewhat at haphazard, 
 just as they come into my mind, without being 
 careful of the chronological order of these intimate 
 events that I am jotting down at present rather 
 than relating. So that the reader will not be sur- 
 prised if, after talking of plays given in 1872 in 
 order not to have to revert to them, I should go 
 back in time in order to find Alphonse Daudet 
 where we just now left him, that is to say, at the 
 moment when he has just left the only employment 
 that he ever held. 
 
 At this time he lived the greater part of the 
 year in the country. He loved the forests which 
 surround Paris, lavishing the tenderness which he 
 has always had for things of nature upon them — 
 waters, forests and mountains — a tenderness which 
 caused him to suddenly leave some village far 
 away in the valley of Chevreuse to make a walk- 
 ing tour through the Vosges and Alsatia. 
 
 He has always eagerly searched for sensations 
 which exterior objects bring forth. In the preface 
 of Fromont Jenne et Risler A hi^ he relates how the 
 mere chance which made him settle in the Marais 
 caused the selection of the neighborhood in which
 
 My Brother and L 447 
 
 he has framed the action of his novel. Analogous 
 circumstances exercised the same kind of influence 
 on the making of his other books; that is particu- 
 larly true oi Jack, in which many pages contain 
 recollections of long excursions made by him into 
 the country about Paris toward Corbeil on the 
 banks of the Seine where his marriage was destined 
 to lead him and make him a fixture for several 
 months in every year. 
 
 This marriage took place early in 1867; in the 
 course of the preceding summer we had been 
 installed at Ville-d'Avray in the family circle, but 
 my brother, who was ill, had remained in Paris. 
 An epidemic of cholera drove him out, so he came 
 and settled down with us. One day some friends 
 who lived in the neighborhood called upon us and 
 brought with them one of their relatives, a Made- 
 moiselle Julia AUard, a most charming young girl, 
 highly educated and learned. It had been her 
 good fortune to grow up in an atmosphere of ten- 
 derness and poetry between a father and mother 
 passionately stirred by intellectual things who were 
 poets themselves. A few months after that she 
 bore the name of Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 Although she had already proved herself a 
 writer by publishing Les Impressions dc Nature et 
 cT Arty wherein the childhood of a Parisian girl can 
 be read, detached notes, impressions which recall 
 things merely glimpsed and a dozen studies on 
 recent books, yet I would not have talked about 
 it, because I know how scared she is by any noise 
 made about her, if it had not been that my brother
 
 44^ Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 himself has publicly acknowledged the influence 
 which she has exerted over his works. 
 
 Alphonse Daudet being the man we know him, 
 the partner whom he took for life might have 
 quenched the pure flame of his spirit and killed 
 his talent, if he had made a mistake in his choice. 
 Fear of just this danger had always mastered him 
 and kept him from marriage. An expression of 
 this made after his marriage will be found in 
 Femmes d' Artistes, more particularly in the story 
 which opens that volume, Madame Hetirtebisc. 
 All of us shared in this fear for him, but his wife 
 has been the very peace of his hearth, the regu- 
 lator of his work and the discreet counsellor of 
 his inspiration. 
 
 " She is herself so much of an artist ! She has 
 taken such a share in everything that I have 
 written ! Not a page which she has not revised 
 and retouched and on which she has not scattered 
 a little bit of her fine golden and azure powder. 
 And so modest withal, so simple, so little the 
 literary woman ! One day I expressed all this 
 and bore witness to a charming and indefatigable 
 collaboration in the dedication to Le Nabab ; my 
 wife has not permitted that dedication to appear, 
 and so I have allowed it to stand only upon ten 
 or twelve copies for friends." 
 
 I know of nothing more eloquent than this 
 simple homage which is no less to the honor of 
 him who gave it than of her who merited it. At 
 the time that my sister-in-law, yielding to the 
 urgent requests of her husband, had just published
 
 My Brother and I. 449 
 
 her collection of impressions, after a few hours 
 passed between her and my brother one evening, 
 quite moved by the happiness I found in their 
 house, I wrote a few lines on returning to my 
 home which seem in place for this study, the pre- 
 text for them being her book just out. These 
 lines form as it were a precise picture of the lucky 
 household where art is god and where the radiance 
 of the happiness one perceives makes a striking 
 and heart-warming contrast with the harsh begin- 
 nings which I have related. 
 
 " The working room is broad and lofty. The 
 master of the household is seated before a table 
 piled with papers and books beneath the white 
 rays of the lamp, the brilliancy of which is softened 
 by a shade in stamped paper ; he is writing the 
 new book promised to the people, announced 
 by the papers and expected by translators and 
 editors. Between each sentence, after having care- 
 fully chosen all the words and carved all the lines, 
 he makes a stop, listening to the promptings of his 
 imagination but disciplining it in order to keep it 
 within the limits of truth, or to drag it back when- 
 ever it is tempted to exceed the bounds. The 
 characters whose adventures he describes and 
 whose souls, instincts and passions he reveals to 
 us pass before his eyes. 
 
 *' With the precision of a painter from the life 
 he reproduces them exactly as he has known 
 them ; he is anxious to render them as truthfully 
 as nature itself, employing in the struggle after 
 nicety of expression, elevation of thought, descrip- 
 
 29
 
 450 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 tion of scenery and surroundings and purity of 
 style, that vigor, that gracefuhiess, that fancy and 
 all those master qualities which exist in him and 
 with which he decorates the offspring of his 
 dreams under the most ardent searchings of con- 
 science, never acknowledging himself satisfied until 
 he has exhausted all the forms of that effort and 
 thus proclaiming the respect which he has for the 
 public and that which he has for himself 
 
 " Over against him at the other end of the table 
 his wife has come quietly in and taken her seat, 
 after having watched at the bedside of the children 
 and kissed their brows good-night. It is a perfect 
 hour, propitious to that quiet labor which en- 
 genders fine works of art. The noises of the 
 streets seem dampened and the whole house slum- 
 bers; this silence so deep is wholesome. A log 
 burns with a merry note on the hearth, the flame 
 therefrom dances above the glowing embers and 
 hangs sparks of red on the gilded frames of the 
 pictures and the copper vases in which green 
 plants are growing. Never did a sweeter and 
 gentler eloquence emanate from the intimate soul 
 of that domestic happiness, never from the 
 serenity of that family hearth where glory has 
 been a visitor. 
 
 " The young mother lets herself drift at the will 
 of her dreams ; she enjoys the present and tries to 
 divine the future, and through an involuntary need 
 of comparing what she knew before with what she 
 possesses now and what she hopes to have, she lets 
 her thoughts turn toward the past. She sees once
 
 My Brother and I. 451 
 
 more her infancy and is at once transported into 
 another home, warm also, comfortable and peace- 
 ful and full of caresses. She sees the days that 
 are passed. Here she is in command, there she 
 obeyed, and that itself was very sweet. She regrets 
 nothing in that past, but on the contrary thinks of 
 it with joy; her memory is full of its echoes and 
 recalls its souvenirs, dear to her mind. 
 
 " And so, seated at her happy table where talent 
 is infectious, seated opposite that man who is every- 
 thing to her and whose pen is writing masterpieces, 
 she suddenly feels herself seized in short by a 
 sort of nostalgia, then she lets fall in harmonious 
 stanzas in prose or in verse these suddenly resur- 
 rected souvenirs upon the white page lying beneath 
 her hand. Such happy evenings are often renewed 
 and when summer comes they are completed by 
 delightful days of country life in the house among 
 the fields backing up against the forest, where the 
 emerald-colored vines and the Chinese glycines 
 with their blue flowers are mirrored in the stream."
 
 452 Alp house Daudet. 
 
 CHAPTER XXL 
 
 Up to 1873 Alphonse Daudet had shown himself 
 averse to works that need long labor. He had 
 written two novels, Le Petit Chose and Tartarm de 
 Tarascon, but these were his works at the begin- 
 ning and belong much earlier in his career; he 
 hardly seemed disposed to take up again a series 
 which had been interrupted. After the war he 
 turned his principal efforts to the theatre, whilst, 
 on the other hand, he gathered together recollec- 
 tions of the end of the Empire, the siege of Paris 
 and the Commune into short studies either histori- 
 cal or imaginative, after the manner of Lettres de 
 Moti Moulin. No less than three volumes were 
 necessary to include them, namely Lettres a un 
 Absent, Contes dii Lnndi and Robert Helmont. 
 
 It is true that during this period he had been 
 examining men and things very closely ; as early 
 as the beginning of 1870 he had already allowed 
 himself to be turned aside from his preoccupations, 
 which up to that time had been purely literary, by 
 the forerunning symptoms of the hurricane; as an 
 observer he followed all the popular manifestations 
 and incidents of politics. 
 
 I remember that one evening, a few days before 
 the plebiscite, he wanted to drag me across the
 
 My Brother and I. 453 
 
 Faubourg du Temple, full of threatening faces and 
 rumors, to be present at an electoral meeting. 
 Tumultuous groups which were restrained with 
 difficulty by an enormous show of armed forces 
 prevented our reaching the end of our walk ; battle 
 had already begun between the Parisians and the 
 Bonapartists. 
 
 Another evening, a few hours after the assassin- 
 ation of Victor Noir, we went to the Ministry of 
 Justice to see Emile Ollivier whom up to that time 
 he had not met. Then occurred the Fourth of 
 September and the siege, during which he re- 
 mained in Paris enrolled as a volunteer in the. 
 National Guard, and, notwithstanding his short- 
 sightedness, a great frequenter of advanced posts, 
 a fearless searcher after sensations, braving danger 
 in order to have the satisfaction of seeing every- 
 thing and of increasing at the end of each exciting 
 day the bulk of those pages of notes, pages already 
 charged with his fine and closely set writing. For 
 nearly two years his literary output was nourished 
 by these recollections and in that way he has hung 
 in his life work, as if in a gallery, a hundred pic- 
 tures which have all the value of historical docu- 
 ments, owing to their exactness and the truth of 
 the observation behind them. 
 
 Perhaps in no part of his work has that power- 
 ful faculty of sight shown itself in the same degree 
 as in these short stories, which are impregnated 
 besides by an emotion that caused his pen to 
 tremble, when, hurriedly, for fear he should for- 
 get it, he noted down in one line some master
 
 454 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 impression which contained all the others. Often 
 a characteristic that struck him lasted several 
 minutes. Often he only had a gHmpse of his 
 model; but that was enough for him to paint the 
 picture without falsifying the likeness. The same 
 statement can be applied to all his work. 
 
 The Commune obliged him to fly from Paris. 
 When he returned and was able to get to work 
 again he only thought of books in which the events 
 he had taken part in should be engraved just as 
 they remained in his memory. 
 
 At the same time, as I have said, he was work- 
 ing for the theatre. The failure of Lise Tavernier, 
 the disappointment as to L ArUsienne put a stop 
 to his energies in that direction. During a repre- 
 sentation of the latter play the idea struck him to 
 make a novel with scenes in Paris and he wrote 
 Fromont Jeime et RisIerAm^m 1873, without fore- 
 seeing the immense success which that volume was 
 to bring him, although its prior publication in Le 
 Bien Public could scarcely have passed unper- 
 ceived. With this novel Charpentier the publisher 
 began his series of volumes with immense editions. 
 A few weeks were enough to distribute that novel 
 through the entire world ; it was read in foreign 
 parts just as much as in France, either in the orig- 
 inal or translations. 
 
 This popularity during the first days of its ap- 
 pearance did not exhaust its success; at the time 
 I write (188 1) several thousand copies are printed 
 every year. The Academic Frangaise itself wanted 
 to share in the manifestations that took place
 
 My Bi'-other and I. 455 
 
 about the name of Alphonse Daudet and it decreed 
 the most literary of the prizes which it annually 
 awards to his novel. 
 
 Owing to the force of events this study of mine 
 has little by little so taken on the character of an 
 apology that at present I feel a certain embarrass- 
 ment in saying what I think of Fromont Jeune et 
 Risler Ain^. 
 
 When speaking of Alphonse Daudet I am able 
 to offer an understanding of the man by means of 
 a simple story of the events of his life, just as one 
 imparts knowledge as to an historical episode by 
 the aid of authentic documents, but I could hardly 
 judge his literary work otherwise than by express^ 
 ing a personal opinion in which admiration would 
 hold the highest place ; so that my judgment 
 would be suspected and therefore without value. 
 It would add nothing to the authority of this 
 chapter of literar)' history and so I renounce the 
 occasion of formulating it. 
 
 But what I have the right to affirm is this, that 
 the truth of the characters and the actuality {v/cu) 
 of the events were the determining cause of the 
 good fortune that befell the first long novel by 
 Alphonse Daudet. No one bothered himself to 
 see whether the plan was very new or whether in 
 one way or another it did not have connecting 
 threads with some other plot which had been 
 already used in books more or less widely spread. 
 What the reader saw above all things and what 
 moved, persuaded and charmed him, was much less 
 the moral of a story which arrayed in contest
 
 456 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 commercial honor and the honor of the domestic 
 hearth, than the simplicity of the intrigue, the truth 
 of the characters to hfe, the poetry and emotion 
 scattered with both hands through those altogether 
 charming chapters. 
 
 Our older men of letters have often told how in 
 other times an entire generation took the greatest, 
 most passionate interest in some hero of romance 
 — Monte Cristo, Fleur-de-Marie, d'Artagnan — ■ 
 whose unlikeness to nature at last caused the interest 
 of living men for fictitious beings to grow stale. It 
 is a long time now since manifestations provoked 
 by a book have fallen to very quiet lines, but they 
 were seen afresh on the appearance of Fromont 
 Jeime et Risler Ahie. Little girl Chebe, D6sir6e 
 the lame girl are popular characters, whilst Delo- 
 belle has become a classic. His name will remain 
 as an epithet suited to define all those in his pro- 
 fession, fashioned after his image and resembling 
 him, who go out in the world. People say : " He 's 
 a Delobelle " just as they say : " He 's a Harpagon." 
 
 After this novel Alphonse Daudet \vro\.Q Jack. 
 In that case also the impulse started with a simple 
 story which came to his knowledge and which the 
 chance of neighborhood permitted him to follow 
 through its various episodes as a witness or confi- 
 dant; this formed the basis of his novel. Faithful 
 to his usual system, he wove in succession about 
 this actual story various characters who in reality 
 never played any part therein, but who neverthe- 
 less had actually lived and had posed before him 
 without their knowino- it. These characters
 
 My Brother and I. 457 
 
 themselves were completed by characteristics and 
 phrases which belonged to others but could be 
 adapted to their character and nature. 
 
 This labor of adaptation and recomposition lies 
 at the root of all Alphonse Daudet's novels — un- 
 less it might be of Le Nabdb^ where he has trans- 
 ferred two characters to his pages without changing 
 anything in their historical physiognomy, namely 
 the two principal actors — I do not know of a sin- 
 gle person whom he has put in his works without 
 having composed the character in this way out of 
 bits and pieces. After the appearance of Rois en 
 Exil there was a veritable craze of curiosity to 
 know which of the living my brother had aimed 
 at and portrayed, a curiosity provoked by the 
 desire to tear away the masks. Well, there is not 
 a single one among the types of that book which 
 is completely and personally real ; a number of 
 models were needed in order to compose a single 
 one. 
 
 This is even true of Numa Romnestan. When 
 this novel began to appear my fellow-countryman 
 Senator Numa Baragnon, after reading the splen- 
 did description of the Arena on a day of popular 
 festival, wrote to me at the close of one of his let- 
 ters : " I have a great mind to sign this letter 
 Numa Roumestan, because people say that it is 
 myself your brother wished to draw, but alas, it is 
 a very long time since the people have taken the 
 horses out of my carriage ! " 
 
 On the other hand there were several people I 
 might designate who were a trifle uneasy, con-
 
 458 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 vinced that Alphonse Daudet had published his 
 book in order to present them in complete life to 
 the curiosity of the public. They were mistaken, 
 all of them ; the continuation of the novel must 
 have proved that to their satisfaction. As was his 
 good right, the author had taken a bit from each 
 of them ; there was not one of them who had 
 posed to him for the entire figure. It is sufficient 
 to be acquainted with the list of politicians of our 
 times to recognize what belongs to one and what 
 to the other. 
 
 But I return to Jack. My brother had talked to 
 me a great deal as to this novel before writing it ; 
 having been placed in the management of the 
 Journal Officiel, I asked him for the right to pub- 
 lish it in the Bulletin Frangais which we had just 
 founded, I representing the Ministry of the Interior 
 in partnership with Emile de Girardin and VVitters- 
 heim, to take the place of the Petit Journal Offi- 
 ciel, which had disappeared with the Empire, 
 
 Alphonse already had charge of the dramatic 
 review in the Officiel. I had confided it to him, 
 having with good reason foreseen that his talents 
 would justify too well the appointment which I 
 made that any one should think of accusing me of 
 nepotism. A wish to give a profitable brilliancy 
 to the newly-born paper placed in my control was 
 sure to justify in the same way the appearance in 
 that paper of a novel signed " Alphonse Daudet." 
 
 But when he brought it to me I was a little 
 frightened at the bringing in toward the beginning 
 of the book of an establishment run by the Jesuits.
 
 My Brother and I. 459 
 
 The official character of our two papers had already 
 occasioned me a certain embarrassment and was 
 about to give me more, all arising from the diffi- 
 culty of granting liberty to writers without impli- 
 cating the government. There are certain Deputies 
 who pick carefully to pieces all the non-official 
 part of the paper, articles on art, articles on liter- 
 ature and even the chronicle of daily events, from 
 which I was expected to banish every mention of 
 crime, suicide or attempted murder. They carried 
 their complaints to the Minister for every line 
 which failed to please them. The papers of that 
 period are full of criticisms and attacks which 
 sprang from the " liberties " taken by the editor 
 of the government journals. 
 
 I remember especially one circumstance which 
 assumed the proportions of an event of importance 
 in our humble family of editors bound together 
 by the strictest fellowship. My learned comrade 
 Bouchut, while alluding to I know not what mal- 
 ady of the nerves in an article devoted to a medi- 
 cal book, had timidly insinuated that it would be 
 easy to explain the ecstasy of Saint Theresa by 
 physiology. The Hon. M. Keller discovered in 
 that very simple and very true statement a denial 
 of miracles ; he told me this during a meeting of 
 the Chamber at Versailles, and after having tried 
 in vain to drag the promise of a denial of the article 
 out of me, he marched ofif to point the matter out 
 to M. Buffet, the President of the Council and 
 Minister of the Interior, who had been but a few 
 hours in office.
 
 460 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 Although M. Buffet would certainly be incapable 
 of exacting from an honest man an act which 
 degraded his professional dignity, still, at first 
 blush he insisted, in order to put it through, that 
 I should disavow what my collaborator had said. 
 One may imagine what my answer was. Insist- 
 ence on one side, resistance on the other. The 
 incident lasted two days and I could only cut it 
 short by declaring that it was true they could take 
 my office from me, but I never would disavow my 
 own fellow-worker. Whether it was kindliness or 
 weakness, M. Buffet disliked extreme measures 
 and the affair came to an end by means of a letter 
 which Dr. Bouchut wrote me, in which with a 
 good deal of cleverness he demonstrated that both 
 of us were above caring for our misadventure. 
 
 I have only told this item from our political cus- 
 toms in order to explain the reasons which made 
 me hesitate to publish /ir/r/C'. Having been made ac- 
 quainted with my embarrassment and troubles, my 
 brother refused to discuss my objections and took 
 his novel to the hospitable office of the Moniteur, 
 which is full of illustrious souvenirs and literary 
 traditions. Paul Dalloz hastened to accept it. 
 
 This book did not meet at the publisher's the 
 success of the preceding one ; which can only be ex- 
 plained by the necessity in which Dentu found him- 
 self of publishing it in two volumes and raising the 
 price, for never had the fine qualities of author and 
 poet shown themselves in greater splendor, never 
 in the same degree had he expressed his affection 
 for the small and humble persons of this world, nor
 
 My Brother and I. 461 
 
 shown better his gifts of moving others when brought 
 in contact with his own emotion, his gift of handling 
 irony and describing the scenery in which he causes 
 his characters to live. 
 
 Whether he is laying bare the peacock brain of 
 Ida de Barancy or is showing us d'Argenton, the 
 most important of the good-for-nothings, squatting 
 so proudly in the midst of his nullity and folly; 
 whether he takes us in the footsteps of poor little 
 Jack as he escapes from the Moronval academy, 
 overwhelmed by the terror of the dark, of the 
 silent and the unknown, as he wanders lost through 
 the fields wrapped in shadows, or relates to us the 
 martyrdom of the little negro king ; whether he 
 describes the quiet landscapes on the banks of the 
 Seine or takes us to Indret to make us laugh with 
 Belisaire and cry with Jack ; whether he opens to 
 our view the still interior of the Rivals or allows 
 us to be present at the last years of d'Argenton's 
 victim — in every case his talent is shown with the 
 rarest power. And although people have pre- 
 tended that he is lacking in imagination, making 
 of this by turns a fault and a merit, yet, through 
 the arrangement and logical accumulation of 
 events which may perhaps have happened before, 
 he has produced in every respect the illusion of a 
 complete and a personal invention. 
 
 Moreover types of humanity follow each other 
 closely, numerous, multifold and original, in a fairy- 
 like setting of descriptions with flesh upon their 
 bones, muscles under the skin, blood in their 
 veins and all the forces of actual life.
 
 462 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 Jack is as free from the anxious care for actual- 
 ity visible in Le Nabab, Les Rois en Exil and Numa 
 Roiimestan, as Fromont Jeiine et Risler A in/ is, but 
 when considered by itself Jack will always be 
 found a species of revelation as a study of manners 
 and yet rigorously exact to life and filled with a 
 vivid sentiment of modernity. Looked at as a 
 whole, this work seems to me a transition, after 
 which Alphonse Daudet came to create for the 
 modern novel a new mold by introducing our 
 social and political history through living charac- 
 ters and inaugurating what I may call his second 
 manner, characterized by that preoccupation for 
 actuality of which I have just spoken. 
 
 That preoccupation itself starts from a constant 
 anxiety to reach the truth. Naturally its result 
 was to complete that masterly faculty in his 
 genius which turns the pen into a brush, gives 
 the saliency of a painting to style and causes 
 color to spring up through the arrangement of 
 words ; it brings men and things to the eyes of 
 the reader, though fixed on a printed page, with 
 a power of vision quite as intense and tangible in 
 its contours as life itself. 
 
 And here it is fitting to add that the quality 
 which gives especial value to the books of 
 Alphonse Daudet and assures serious chances 
 of durability to them is the fact that as a whole 
 they constitute an exact image of his time. 
 Whether stories or novels or even intimate studies 
 like those which furnish forth the volume Les 
 Femmes d' Artistes, one of the less known books
 
 Mv Brother and I. 463 
 
 which I recommend to connoisseurs, all include a 
 " documentary quality " which greatly increases 
 their value. This story found in Lettres a un 
 Absent ox that episode in F^cs Rots en ^,r// will be 
 found a page of history which those persons ought 
 to read before they set to work who may under- 
 take to study us, their predecessors, in the future, 
 as to events, as to family life and as to mankind. 
 The death and funeral of the Due de Mora, the 
 visit of the Bey of Tunis to the castle of the Nabob, 
 the studio of Felicia Ruys, the Levis agency, the 
 watch under arms and the trip of Numa Roume- 
 stan as Minister to his native town — there is 
 history in the best sense of the word, not the 
 official history of facts, but that history of passions 
 and appetites and aspirations which help to make 
 them understood ! Merimee was quite right when 
 he said he was ready to barter Thiicydidcs for a 
 single page of the Memoirs of Aspasia. No less 
 is required to brighten with a luminous ray a 
 vanished civilization. 
 
 By giving a commentary on history in that way, 
 by taking possession in such fashion of men and 
 things, the modern novel has made a glorious 
 conquest. Moreover it has imposed new convic- 
 tions upon the science of history. Among the 
 younger writers all those who occupy themselves 
 with that science have perceived that since the 
 novel has taken something from them, history 
 must also take something from the novel. It has 
 borrowed from the novel its form and analyses, its 
 descriptions and even its dialogues.
 
 464 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 Only a little while ago, with rare exceptions, 
 even the most distinguished historians would have 
 thought that they were derogating from the rules 
 of their art and the majesty of the past and from 
 memoirs in the grand style ; they would have 
 thought that events were degraded if they de- 
 parted from a cold and restrained style by placing 
 their characters within a descriptive framework, 
 while showing us their features and adapting their 
 actions to the proportions of daily life and by 
 making them act and talk just as we act and talk 
 ourselves. 
 
 The modern school has modified and trans- 
 formed the procedure ; it will modify and trans- 
 form it still more and that peaceful revolution will 
 have been ocasioned by the transformation of the 
 novel, which itself has been performed through the 
 power of public taste. For what those of us who 
 have any sort of care, lest we drown in the sea of 
 general indifference, should never forget is the fact 
 that it is reality, it is life, that the present genera- 
 tion exacts from artists. The novel for its own 
 sake, that is to say fiction, is dead, very dead. 
 What the reader expects to find in books that 
 demand his attention is himself, his vices and 
 virtues, his own image, everything which by him- 
 self he would not be able to see. The art of the 
 novelist, like that of the painter, as well as the art 
 of the historian, consists in showing himself well 
 to himself under the different forms which each of 
 these kinds of literature demand. 
 
 That is, and I know it well, or very nearly that,
 
 My Brother and I. 465 
 
 the doctrine of the naturaHstic school. The deci- 
 siveness with which that school has made itself the 
 owner of these truths by endeavoring to claim as its 
 own the personality of Alphonse Daudet has not 
 done anything less for its own success than has 
 the energetic temperament which belongs to the 
 most famous of its apostles. But whatever may 
 be the scientific formulas, perhaps a trifle puerile, 
 with which he has clothed them in order to deco- 
 rate his conception of the novel with a special and 
 personal merit of its own, we can hardly admit 
 that these truths are his own invention or that 
 these rules are exclusively his. 
 
 They had been employed before he wrote them 
 on his banner and entered the fight under their 
 name. Without going back to Balzac, when one 
 considers how great the advance is which they 
 have made since his time and the large share which 
 they hold in our preoccupations, it is very difficult 
 not to attribute the chief reason for their progress 
 to Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. There are the 
 two fathers of the naturalistic novel ! L'Assojnmoir 
 had its ancestor : Germinie Lacerteux! There stand 
 the principles of the school put into practical form 
 by that manifestation of a manly genius which 
 never tried either to make a dogmatic profession 
 of them nor to impose them upon others, and 
 which never cared to demonstrate their power 
 save through the uses which were made of them. 
 So then, if it is not permissible for the most famous 
 disciple of naturalism to proclaim himself its in- 
 ventor without committing a grave injustice, it is 
 
 30
 
 466 Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 all the easier for him to ally the Goncourts to his 
 school, which is indeed theirs. 
 
 But he would not be able to introduce in the 
 same way Alphonse Daudet, whose qualities as 
 poet and author, whose exquisite delicacy and 
 deep tenderness, as well as his repugnance for 
 everything that \% trivial or coarse, protest against 
 the use that some people have wished to make of 
 his name in a party which only owes its victories 
 to its chiefs, a party which has not yet founded 
 anything and which would suddenly vanish if it 
 lost them. 
 
 No, Alphonse Daudet cannot be enlisted in those 
 ranks any more than others, for he is too little a man 
 of schools and dogmas, too averse to every kind of 
 ostracism, too proudly independent and, to sum 
 'up everything in a word, too completely an artist ! 
 Whatever effort may be made to put a label on 
 him, that effort will be in vain. Alphonse Daudet 
 is himself That is the essence of his inborn origi- 
 nality, the personal mark of his life work. 
 
 Petites-Dalles (Seine-Inf6rieure). 
 August-September, 1881.
 
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