Alphonse Daudet was born at Nimes on the 13th of May, 1840. He was the
younger son of a rich and enthusiastically Royalist silk-manufacturer
of that town, the novelist, Ernest Daudet (born 1837), being his elder
brother. In their childhood, the father, Vincent Daudet, suffered
reverses, and had to settle with his family, in reduced circumstances,
at Lyons. Alphonse, in 1856, obtained a post as usher in a school at
Alais, in the Gard, where he was extremely unhappy. All these painful
early experiences are told very pathetically in “Le Petit Chose.” On
the 1st of November, 1857, Alphonse fled from the horrors of his life at
Alais, and joined his brother Ernest, who had just secured a post in the
service of the Duc de Morny in Paris. Alphonse determined to live by
his pen, and presently obtained introductions to the “Figaro.” His early
volumes of verse, “Les Amoureuses” of 1858 and “La Double Conversion”
of 1861, attracted some favourable notice. In this latter year his
difficulties ceased, for he had the good fortune to become one of the
secretaries of the Duc de Morny, a post which he held for four years,
until the popularity of his writings rendered him independent. To the
generosity of his patron, moreover, he owed the opportunity of visiting
Italy and the East. His first novel, “Le Chaperon Rouge,” 1863, was not
very remarkable, and Daudet turned to the stage. His principal dramatic
efforts of this period were “Le Dernier Idole,” 1862, and “L’OEillet
Blanc,” 1865. Alphonse Daudet’s earliest important work, however, was
“Le Petit Chose,” 1868, a very pathetic autobiography of the first
eighteen years of his life, over which he cast a thin veil of romance.
After the death of the Duc de Morny, Daudet retired to Provence, leasing
a ruined mill at Fortvielle, in the valley of the Rhone; from this
romantic solitude, among the pines and green oaks, he sent forth those
exquisite studies of Provencal life, the “Lettres de mon Moulin.” After
the war, Daudet reappeared in Paris, greatly strengthened and ripened
by his hermit-existence in the heart of Provence. He produced one
masterpiece after another. He had studied with laughter and joy the
mirthful side of southern exaggeration, and he created a figure in which
its peculiar qualities should be displayed, as it were, in excelsis.
This study resulted, in 1872, in “The Prodigious Feats of Tartarin of
Tarascon,” one of the most purely delightful works of humour in the
French language. Alphonse Daudet now, armed with his cahiers, his little
green-backed books of notes, set out to be a great historian of
French manners in the second half of the nineteenth century. His first
important novel, “Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine,” 1874, enjoyed a notable
success; it was followed in 1876 by “Jack,” in 1878 by “Le Nabob,” in
1879 by “Les Rois en Exil,” in 1881 by “Numa Roumestan,” in 1883 by
“L’Evangeliste,” and in 1884 by “Sapho.” These are the seven great
romances of modern French life on which the reputation of Alphonse
Daudet as a novelist is mainly built. They placed him, for the moment at
all events, near the head of contemporary European literature. By this
time, however, a physical malady, which Charcot was the first to locate
in the spinal cord, had begun to exhaust the novelist’s powers. This
disease, which took the form of what was supposed to be neuralgia in
1881, racked him with pain during the sixteen remaining years of his
life, and gradually destroyed his powers of locomotion. It spared
the functions of the brain, but it cannot be denied that after 1884
something of force and spontaneous charm was lacking in Daudet’s books.
He continued, however, the adventures of Tartarin, first with unabated
gusto in the Alps, then less happily as a colonist in the South Seas. He
wrote, in the form of a novel, a bitter satire on the French Academy,
of which he was never a member; this was “L’Immortel” of 1888. He wrote
romances, of little power, the best being “Rose et Ninette” of 1892, but
his imaginative work steadily declined in value. He published in 1887
his reminiscences, “Trente Ans de Paris,” and later on his “Souvenirs
d’un Homme de Lettres.” He suffered more and more from his complaint,
from the insomnia it caused, and from the abuse of chloral. He was
able, however, to the last, to enjoy the summer at his country-house, at
Champrosay, and even to travel in an invalid’s chair; in 1896 he visited
for the first time London and Oxford, and saw Mr. George Meredith. In
Paris he had long occupied rooms in the Rue de Bellechasse, where Madame
Alphonse Daudet was accustomed to entertain a brilliant company. But in
1897 it became impossible for him to mount five flights of stairs any
longer, and he moved to the first floor of No. 41 Rue de l’Universite.
Here on the 16th of December, 1897, as he was chatting gaily at the
dinner-table, he uttered a cry, fell back in his chair, and was dead.
The personal appearance of Alphonse Daudet, in his prime, was very
striking; he had clearly cut features, large brilliant eyes, and an
amazing exuberance of curled hair and forked beard.