Tartarin de Tarascon. Alphonse Daudet
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fitted to study conditions in his own narrow sphere; at the same time he acquired the power of vigorous description and collected material for some of his finest short stories and for the Tartarin series.
A portion of the summer of 1861 he dreamed away in an abandoned mill[1] near Fontvieille, between Tarascon and Arles. From here he sent to the Parisian newspapers L'Evènement and Le Figaro those delightful stories and sketches which were gathered and published in 1869 under the title "Lettres de mon moulin." Of all the many volumes of Daudet's collected works this is the most satisfying: it is here that the distinctive products of his genius are to be sought; and it is on these stories, with a few from later collections, and on "Tartarin de Tarascon," that his claim to immortality will finally rest. It is here that we find several of his most excellent stories: "Le Secret de maître Cornille", "La Chèvre de M. Seguin", "La Mule du pape", "Le Curé de Cucugnan", "L'Élixir du révérend père Gaucher" and others.
[Footnote 1: Daudet did not live in the mill which he has made famous, but he spent there "de longues journées"; he never owned it, but the deed which serves so picturesquely as preface to his book is not entirely apocryphal. See "Trente Ans de Paris", p. 164.]
In 1865, at the death of Morny, he gave up his secretaryship and applied himself exclusively to literature.
In 1866 he met Julie Allard, and early the next year they were married. To his wife, a lady of exquisite taste, Daudet owed unfailing encouragement and competent, sympathetic criticism.
"Le Petit Chose," his first long work, had been begun in 1866 during his stay in Provence; it was published in 1868. The first part, which is of great interest, is largely autobiographical and covers the childhood and youth of the writer up to his first years in Paris; the second part is a colorless romance of no particular merit. Daudet himself confessed that the work had been written too soon and with too little reflection. "I wish I had waited," he said; "something good might have been written on my youth".[1]
[Footnote 1: See "Trente Ans de Paris," pp. 75, 85, and Sherard, "Alphonse Daudet," p. 301.]
"Tartarin de Tarascon" was written in 1869.
Success and happiness had crowned Daudet's efforts. He was spending his time in all tranquility, now at Paris, now at Champrosay, where he occupied the house of the painter Delacroix. Suddenly in July, 1870, the war cloud burst. Daudet lay stretched out on his bed fretfully nursing a broken leg. On his recovery he shouldered his gun and joined in the hopeless defense of Paris.
It was the war that killed the old Daudet and brought into existence the new. Before the war, Daudet himself confesses it, he had lived free from care, singing and trifling, heedless of the vexing problems of society and the world, his heart aglow with the fire of the sun of his native Provence. The war awakened in our sensitive poet a seriousness of purpose which harmonized but little with his native genius. Among his friends he never lost his old-time buoyant gaiety; but his works from now on show only a trace of it. The charming "Belle-Nivernaise" (1886), a few "tarasconades," a gleam here and there in all his works, remind us of our old friend and plead for our sympathy with the new.
During the next few years he added to his reputation as a writer of short stories; to this period belong several collections of tales and sketches: "Lettres à un absent" (1871), "Contes du lundi" (1873), "Les Femmes d'artistes" (1874), "Robert Helmont" (1874). A few of the stories are still more or less in the manner of the "Lettres de mon moulin" ("Le Pape est mort," "Un Réveillon dans le marais," "Les Émotions d'un perdreau rouge"), but all these volumes, except "Les Femmes d'artistes," are inspired by the war. The playfulness of the youthful Daudet is still apparent here and there in the war stories ("La Pendule de Bougival," "Les Petits Pâtés"), but a sterner tone is prevalent.
The great novels which now follow are the fruit of meditation, the ripening process which the war precipitated, and which was fed from the flame of Flaubert, Goncourt, Zola, and others. Neglecting almost entirely those elements of his genius which came to him as his birthright, he devotes himself henceforth to a study of the problems of life. Our Provençal cicada has a purpose now: nothing else than the reformation of all social abuses. He does not single out one and attack it time after time, but he springs restlessly from one to another, directing high and low his relentless inquiry.
"Fromont jeune et Risler aîné" (1874) is the first of Daudet's great novels and one of his strongest studies. Sidonie, the daughter of humble bourgeois parents, is filled with a longing for luxury and social prominence. She succeeds in becoming the wife of Fromont, a simple, honest workman whose talent and industry have brought him wealth. Sidonie's unscrupulousness in the pursuit of her object spreads ruin. Risler, the partner of Fromont, withdraws large sums from the common treasury to satisfy the extravagant desires of Sidonie whom he loves. Fromont's eyes are at last opened; he finds the firm, which had always been his pride, on the verge of bankruptcy; he discovers the perfidy of Sidonie and attempts to force her to beg on her knees the forgiveness of Risler's long-suffering wife. Sidonie flees and becomes a concert-hall singer. Her revenge is complete when by means of a letter she proves to Fromont that she has corrupted his much-loved younger brother. Fromont hangs himself.
Outside the main current of the plot Daudet sketches one of the little dramas of humble life of which he was so fond: the story of Delobelle, an impoverished actor who lives for his art while his devoted wife and daughter Désirée patiently ply the needle to earn bread.
Daudet up to this time had been recognized as the greatest of French short-story writers. The success of "Fromont jeune et Risler aîné" was immediate, and in his succeeding novels he confirmed more and more surely his right to a place in the front rank of French novelists.
From this story of the life of the petite bourgeoisie he turns to a wider field. The Bohemia of Paris, a glimpse of the country, and especially the life of the artisan, fill "Jack" (1876). Daudet had known the real Jack at Champrosay in 1868. In the novel Jack is the illegitimate son of Ida de Barency, a shallow demi-mondaine who is passionately devoted to the boy but brings to him nothing but misfortune. Jack begins his suffering in a wretched school where his mother has placed him after the Jesuits had refused to receive him. This school is supported by the tuition fees of boys from tropical countries, petits pays chauds, as Moronval, the villainous director, calls them. The teachers belong to that class of ratés, artistic and literary failures, whom Daudet learned to know well during his first years in Paris. One of these ratés captivates Ida de Barency, and Jack's life of misery continues. Despite his physical unfitness, he is sent to labor in the shipbuilding yards at Indret, suffers tortures in the stoking room of an ocean steamer, is wrecked, and returns to France in a piteous condition. His love for Cécile, granddaughter of a gentle country doctor, is rapidly making a man of him, when his mother enters again into his life and the poor boy dies miserably in a hospital, killed by despair rather than by disease.
This is perhaps the most powerful of Daudet's novels; it is certainly the most harrowing. The tragedy of the whole is only slightly relieved by the interweaving of the romance of good Bélisaire, the hawker, one of Jack's few friends.
"Le Nabab" (1878) is concerned with politics, the richer bourgeoisie, and the aristocracy. Jansoulet, the "nabob," returns from Tunis with a large fortune and immediately becomes the prey of parasites. He is made the enemy of the banker Hemerlingue through the social rivalry of their wives. He is elected député from Corsica. The legality of the election is questioned. Jansoulet is supported by the prime minister, the duc de Mora, but the latter dies suddenly, Jansoulet's election is declared invalid, and he dies from a stroke of apoplexy.
Despite the protest of the author, contemporaries found originals for a number of the characters of this novel. The duc de Mora is Morny, and several others have been identified with greater or less certainty. Félicia Ruys is perhaps Sarah Bernhardt.
The purely romantic element of the work is found in the story of Paul de Géry and the Joyeuse family, a secondary plot having no vital connection with the main story.
In "Les Rois en exil" (1880) Daudet explores a new vein in contemporary society. He explains that the idea of the work occured to him one October evening when, standing in the Place du Carrousel, he was contemplating the ruins of the Tuileries.