Alphonse Daudet

Alphonse Daudet: Provence, Pain, and a Divided Reputation

For the last decade and a half of his life Alphonse Daudet was dying by degrees. Syphilis had settled into his spinal cord as tabes dorsalis, and he kept notes on what it was doing to him — fragments about the failure of his legs, the lightning pains, the humiliations of the body — which were published long after his death as *La Doulou*, translated into English as *In the Land of Pain*. It is one of the most unsparing accounts of chronic suffering in French literature, and it was written by the man France remembers, when it remembers him at all, for charming stories about a windmill.

Nîmes, and the Failed Silk Works

Louis Marie Alphonse Daudet was born at Nîmes on 13 May 1840, the son of a silk manufacturer. The 1848 Revolution wrecked the business; his father sold the factory and moved the family north to Lyon in 1849, and by 1857 the collapse was complete. The gap between the sun-drenched Provence of his infancy and the grey commercial failure that followed it became the permanent tension in his work — the south is always something already lost.

He was an unhappy student, and when the money ran out he took work as a *pion*, a study supervisor, at a provincial college at Alès. It was a miserable, humiliating job and he mined it for years afterwards.

Paris

In 1857 his elder brother Ernest rescued him and brought him to Paris. He arrived as a poet: *Les Amoureuses*, a collection of love poems, appeared in 1858, when he was eighteen. Through Ernest's connections he began contributing social sketches to *Le Figaro* from 1859, developing the blend of sentiment and satirical observation that would define him.

From 1860 to 1865 he had the kind of luck that changes a career: a post as secretary to the Duc de Morny, half-brother to Napoleon III and one of the most powerful men in the Second Empire. It gave him financial security, a view of the governing class he would later put to use, and time to write for the theatre. When Morny died, Daudet committed himself entirely to literature.

The Windmill

*Lettres de mon moulin* began appearing in Paris newspapers from 1866 and was collected in 1869. The conceit — a writer sending dispatches from a disused mill in Provence — gave him a form that suited his gift exactly. Daudet was an exceptional oral storyteller, and he cultivated a narrative voice of extraordinary intimacy, so that a reader feels less like someone reading than someone being told. The tales are short, apparently artless, and much harder than they look; several are still learned by French schoolchildren.

*Le Petit Chose* (1868) followed, a largely autobiographical novel drawing on the family's ruin and the misery at Alès.

Tartarin

In 1872 came *Aventures prodigieuses de Tartarin de Tarascon*, the book that made him popular across Europe and the one work of his that stayed continuously in print. Tartarin — the plump, boastful, entirely harmless Provencal who sets off to shoot lions in Algeria — is a comic invention of real durability, an affectionate satire on southern self-mythology that stops just short of contempt. Daudet returned to him twice more.

The same year brought *L'Arlésienne*, a serious drama with incidental music by Georges Bizet. It failed on first production and was later acclaimed; Bizet's suites have long outlived the play.

The Naturalist Years

The trauma of the Franco-Prussian War pushed Daudet toward the documentary novel, and into the company of Flaubert, Turgenev, the Goncourts and Zola. He adopted naturalist methods — the world rendered in all its determinisms — and produced a run of substantial social novels: *Fromont jeune et Risler aîné* (1874), which made his serious reputation; *Jack* (1876); *Le Nabab* (1877), drawing on his Second Empire years; *Numa Roumestan* (1881); and *Sapho* (1884). He married Julia Allard in 1867; they had three children.

He never became a doctrinaire naturalist, and the reason is the thing critics have argued about ever since. He tempered the method with sentiment — and his instincts remained those of a short-story writer, so that even the novels tend to break into episodes, functioning as collections of tales in a novel's coat.

In the Land of Pain

The disease took the last years. He died in Paris on 16 December 1897, following an apoplectic attack. The notebooks that became *La Doulou*, published in 1929, record the process from inside with a clarity that has almost nothing in common with the warmth of the Provencal stories, and they have given him, a century on, an unexpected second readership among writers on illness and the body.

Why Alphonse Is Called a Genius

The faculty is voice. Daudet could produce, on paper, the exact sensation of being spoken to — an intimacy of address that almost no other nineteenth-century French writer attempted, let alone sustained. His short stories, particularly those in *Lettres de mon moulin*, achieved classic status in his own lifetime and are still taught in French schools; modern scholarship treats him primarily as a major figure in the short story, a form he shaped in French as decisively as Maupassant did from another direction. Twenty volumes of work brought him a worldwide reputation, and *Tartarin* is one of the very few comic characters of the period who is still funny.

The counter-case is that the same instinct wrecks the serious work. His realist novels are undermined by what one assessment calls "lacrimonious appeals to reader sentiment" — the naturalist frame is repeatedly abandoned for a good cry, and Britannica's flat summary is that he is "now remembered chiefly as the author of sentimental tales of provincial life in the south of France." His broader influence has declined considerably since his death, and beside Flaubert or Zola, the writers he sat with, he looks like a miniaturist who kept attempting murals.

There is also a matter that no honest account can leave out. Daudet was a monarchist and a fervent opponent of the French Republic, and he held antisemitic views — in the France of the 1890s that was not an abstract position, and his son Léon became a leading figure of the extreme nationalist right. The charm of the stories is real; so is this, and it belongs in the same paragraph.

Legacy

Daudet remains widely read in France, with schools and streets carrying his name, and *Lettres de mon moulin* and the *Tartarin* books have never gone out of circulation. Bizet's *L'Arlésienne* music is in the standard orchestral repertoire, detached from the play that failed. And *In the Land of Pain*, the least characteristic thing he ever wrote, has turned out to be among the most durable — a writer who spent his career making suffering palatable leaving, at the end, a record of it with the sugar removed.

Achievements

• Knight of the Legion of Honour — 1870
• Officer of the Legion of Honour — 1886
• Jouy Prize — 1875
• Notable work: Tartarin of Tarascon
• Notable work: Letters From My Windmill
• Notable work: Le petit chose
• Notable work: Monsieur Seguin's Last Kid Goat
• Genres: tale and drama