DAUDET, Alphonse

Nationality: French. Born: Nîmes, 13 May 1840. Education: Educated in Lyons. Military Service: National Guard, 1870. Family: Married Julia Allard in 1867; two sons and one daughter. Career: Pupil-teacher, 1855-56; school usher, Collège d'Alais, 1857; secretary for Duc de Morny, 1860-65. Full-time writer and playwright, from 1865, Paris. Died: 16 December 1897.

Publications

Collections

Works. 24 vols., 1898-1900.

The Novels, Romances and Writings of Daudet. 20 vols., 1898-1903.

Oeuvres complètes. 18 vols., 1899-1901; 20 vols., 1929-31.

Oeuvres complètes illustrées. 20 vols., 1929-31.

oeuvres, edited by Jean-Louis Curtis. 12 vols., 1965-66.

oeuvres, edited by Roger Ripoll. 1986—.

Short Stories

Le Roman du Chaperon rouge: scènes et fantaisies. 1862.

Lettres de mon moulin. Impressions et souvenirs. 1869; edited by Jacques-Henry Bornecque; 2 vols., 1948; as Stories of Provence (selection), 1886; as Letters from My Mill, 1880; as Letters from a Windmill in Provence, 1922; as French Stories from Daudet, 1945; as Letters from My Mill and Letters to an Absent One, 1971; as Letters from My Windmill, 1978.

Lettres à un absent. 1871; as Letters to an Absent One, 1900; asLetters to an Absent One and Letters from My Mill, 1971.

Robert Helmont. Études et paysages. 1873; as Robert Helmont: Diary of a Recluse, 1870-1871, 1892.

Contes du lundi. 1873; revised edition, 1878; as Contes militaires(special edition), edited by J.T.W. Brown, 1892; as Monday Tales (bilingual edition), 1950.

Contes et récits (collection). 1873.

Les Femmes d'artistes. 1874; as Wives of Men of Genius, 1889; asArtists' Wives, 1890.

Contes choisis. La fantasie et l'histoire (collection). 1877.

Les Cigognes, légende rhénane. 1883.

La Belle-Nivernaise. Histoire d'un vieux bateau et de son équipage, illustrated by Émile Montégut. 1886; as La Belle-Nivernaise; The Story of an Old Boat and Her Crew (and Other Stories), 1887; as La Belle-Nivernaise, the Story of a River-Barge and its Crew, edited by James Boïelle, 1888; La Belle-Nivernaise and Other Stories, 1895.

La Fedór. L'Enterrement d'une étoile. 1896.

La Fedór. Pages de la vie, illustrated by Faìes. 1897; in part asTrois souvenirs, 1896.

Le Trésor d'Arlatan, illustrated by H. Laurent Desrousseaux. 1897.

Novels

Le Petit Chose. Histoire d'un enfant. 1868; as My Brother Jack, or the Story of What-d'ye-Call'em, 1877; as The Little Good-for-Nothing, 1878.

Aventures prodigieuses de Tartarin de Tarascon. 1872; as The New Don Quixote, or the Wonderful Adventures of Tartarin de Tarascon, 1875.

Fromont jeune et Risler aîné. Moeurs parisiennes. 1874; asSidonie, 1877.

Jack. Moeurs contemporaines. 2 vols., 1876; translated as Jack, 1877.

Le Nabab. Moeurs parisiennes. 1877; as The Nabob, 1877.

Les Rois en exil. 1879; Kings in Exile, 1879.

Numa Roumestan. 1881.

L'Evangéliste. Roman parisien. 1883; Port Salvation; or, The Evangelist, 2 vols., 1883.

Sapho. Moeurs parisiennes. 1884; as Sappho, 1884; as Sappho: A Picture of Life in Paris, 1954.

Tartarin sur les Alpes. Nouveaux exploits du héros tarasconnais.1885; as Tartarin on the Alps, 1887.

L'Immortel. 1888.

Port-Tarascon. Dernières aventures de l'illustre Tartarin. 1890; as Port-Tarascon, the Last Adventures of the Illustrious Tartarin, 1891.

Rose et Ninette. Moeurs du jour. 1892; as Rose and Ninette, 1892.

La Petit Paroisse. Moeurs conjugales. 1895.

Soutien de famille. Moeurs contemporaines. 1898; as The Head of the Family, 1898.

Plays

La Dernière Idole, with others (produced 1862). 1862.

Les Absents (produced 1864). 1863.

L'oeillet blanc, with others (produced 1865). 1865.

Le Frère aîné, with others (produced 1867). 1868.

Le Sacrifice (produced 1869). 1869.

L'Arlésienne (produced 1872). 1872; as L'Arlésienne (The Girl of Arles), 1894.

Lise Tavernier (produced 1872). 1872.

Le Char, with others (produced 1878). 1878.

Théâtre. 3 vols., 1880-99.

Le Nabab, with others (produced 1880). 1881.

Jack, with others (produced 1881). 1882.

Fromont jeune et Risler aîné, with others (produced 1886). 1886.

Numa Roumestan (produced 1887). 1890.

La Lutte pour la vie (produced 1889). 1890.

L'Obstacle (produced 1889, with music by Reynaldo Hahn). 1891.

Sapho, with others (produced 1885). 1893.

La Menteuse, with others (produced 1892). 1893.

Poetry

Les Amoureuses. 1858; enlarged edition, 1863; enlarged edition, as Les Amoureuses. Poèmes et fantaisies, 1857-61, 1873.

La Double Conversion, conte en vers. 1861.

Other

oeuvres. 16 vols., 1879-91.

Oeuvres complètes. 8 vols., 1881-87; 24 vols., 1897-99.

Souvenirs d'un homme de lettres. Pages retrouvés (memoirs).1888; as Recollections of a Man, 1889.

Trente ans de Paris. A travers ma vie et mes livres (memoirs).1888; as Thirty Years of Paris and of My Literary Life, 1888.

Entre les Frises et la rampe. Petites études de la vie théâtrale. 1894.

Notes sur la vie (memoirs). 1899.

Premier Voyage, Premier Mensonge. Souvenirs de mon enfance(memoirs), illustrated by Bigot-Valentin. 1900; as My First Voyage, My First Lie, 1901.

Pages inédites de critique dramatique, 1874-1880, edited by Lucien Daudet. 1923.

La Doulou. 1929; as La Doulou: La vie: Extraits des carnets inédit de l'auteurs, 1931; as Suffering 1887-95, 1934.

Histoire d'une amitié: Correspondance inédite entre Daudet et Frédéric Mistral 1860-1897, edited by Jacques-Henry Bornecque. 1979.

Translator, Vie d'enfant by Batisto Bonnet. 1894. Translator, with others, Valet de ferme. 1894.

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Bibliography:

Daudet, A Critical Bibliography by Geoffrey E. Hare, 2 vols., 1978-79.

Critical Studies:

Daudet (biography) by Robert H. Sherard, 1894; "Three Notes to Daudet's Stories" by T.A. Jenkins, Modern Language Notes, May 1907; in The Historical Novel and Other Essays by Brander Matthews, 1901; Daudet, by G.V. Dobie, 1949; in The Short Story by Sean O'Faolain, 1951; The Career of Daudet: A Critical Study by Murray Sachs, 1965; Daudet by Alphonse V. Roche, 1976; "Willa Cather and Alphonse Daudet" by James Woodress, in Cather Studies, 1993, pp.156-66; "The Recovery of Psychic Center in Daudet's Les Lettres de mon moulin " by James F. Hamilton, in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Fall 1995-Winter 1996, pp. 133-43.

* * *

For 40 years Alphonse Daudet was an active, and highly successful, man of letters, busily publishing poems, plays, novels, short stories, and memoirs—20 volumes' worth, in the most complete edition of his works—for which he earned a major worldwide reputation. A century later that major reputation is in sharp decline, even in France, where most of his works are no longer read, or in print; his place in French literary history, though far from negligible, is yet among those of the second rank. In addition to two or three still-popular novels, only a select handful of his nearly one hundred short stories are "alive" today, having been kept steadily in print since they first appeared. But those stories are so well known, and so widely read, in France and elsewhere, that they have attained the status of classics in the genre and are regularly studied in the schools. As a short story writer, Daudet is still a major figure.

It is an irony that would not have been lost on Daudet himself that it is only in a "minor" genre that posterity now recognizes him as a major figure. It must be added, however, that Daudet himself never considered the short story a "minor" genre. It was his genre of choice, in which he had learned his craft, and which he had gladly practiced, in some form, throughout his career, from first to last. There is, indeed, symbolic significance in the fact that his last publication was a short story. More telling still is the evidence that a "short story mindset" pervades all his work: his poems often tell a story, his plays can be seen as dramatized anecdotes, and critics have regularly noted that his novels are either episodic in structure, or have so many detachable subplots that they resemble ingeniously disguised short story collections. Storytelling was indeed second nature to Daudet, and he understood full well that it was the indispensable foundation of his literary calling.

Daudet himself believed that he owed his talent as a teller of tales to his meridional temperament: vivacity, emotional warmth, and facility with language. There is much contemporary testimony that, on social occasions, Daudet often proved himself a gifted and spellbinding raconteur. That special ability transfers itself vividly into a story writing style that is effusive yet intimate, and that gives the reader the pleasing sensation of "listening" to the author spontaneously telling the story aloud to an audience of one. The secret of this "oral" style, so carefully cultivated by Daudet in his short stories, lies in the successful creation of the right narrational "voice" for each occasion, and for that kind of creation Daudet possessed an instinctive ease.

Daudet's first published story collection, Lettres de mon moulin (Letters from My Windmill), was ideally suited to the fullest exploitation of this "oral" style. Each story purported to be a letter from the author to various correspondents, thus justifying an informal, warmly personal, and quasi-conversational style, and enabling the author to vary mood, tone, and narrational "voice" according to the subject of each tale. For a somber account of a tragically unrequited love, as in "The Arlesian Girl," Daudet adopted a spare and self-effacing narrative manner, using simple peasant words and short sentences, to emphasize the stark horror of the drama. Tales of minor ecclesiastical misdeeds, by contrast, such as "The Elixir of Reverend Father Gaucher" or "The Pope's Mule," are more effectively rendered in a tone of mounting, infectious gaiety, regularly undercut by sly, ironic observations that create a comfortable distance, for the reader, from the mildly scandalous events being narrated. Stories that broached the moral dilemmas of the author's own calling—"M. Seguin's Goat" and "The Legend of the Man with the Golden Brain" are the chief examples—required the sententiousness and mock solemnity of the fable, the legend, or the exemplary tale so that the reader might be properly entertained without missing the seriousness of the story's moral insight.

There is striking variety of style, technique, and subject matter in Letters from My Windmill, but the common denominator of all the stories is the skill and refined craftsmanship with which each story is presented. This was the first publication in which Alphonse Daudet exhibited something more than a lively imagination and an engaging narrative manner: he proved himself a meticulous and demanding stylist, with a sense of form and structure, a keen ear for appropriate sentence rhythm, and a willingness to revise his work repeatedly, to meet his own aesthetic standards. He had become a disciplined artist.

During the 1870s Daudet expanded his range and his productivity in the short story, finding new subject matter in the Franco-Prussian War and in the daily life of Parisians, for example, and discovering new ways to tell a contemporary tale without losing any of the freshness and charm of his "oral" technique. In the early 1870s he wrote four volumes of stories and sketches, including the very successful Contes du lundi (Monday Tales), and at the end of the decade he produced revised and augmented editions of Letters from My Windmill and Monday Tales that, together, contained all of his short stories he wished to keep in print. Those two definitive volumes, and two longer novellas he wrote at the end of his life, La Fédor. L'Enterrement d'une étoile and Le Trésor d'Arlatan, (Arlatan's Treasure), represent his total surviving contribution to the art of the short story. It is a distinguished achievement by any measure. First and foremost, he reminded his fellow writers (and his readers) of the distant oral origins of storytelling, for he devised a writing style that recaptured the flavor, excitement, and intimacy of the human voice, which was the ancient world's vehicle for the transmission of tales. He also demonstrated commitment to the short story genre when it was still a literary novelty, by treating it with high seriousness and bringing to bear upon it all of his discipline and artistry. He had the singular capacity to probe the deepest of human emotions in his stories, with sympathy and understanding, yet with enough skeptical irony to avoid the pitfall of sentimentality. He wrote most often about unhappy love, and about the vulnerability of the innocent in a corrupt world, because those themes corresponded most closely to his own experience of the world—hence the personal and intimate tone that characterized so many of his short stories, and that generations of readers have found to be so moving. Whatever the future may hold for the rest of his work, one must believe that Daudet's short stories will continue to live, for the world will always take time to "listen" to a storyteller who can tell a tale as entrancingly as he does.

—Murray Sachs

See the essay on "The Pope's Mule."