etter if he had never gone to Paris, but, like
his friend Mistral, had remained in Provence and devoted his essentially
poetic genius to an expression of the spirit of the south. His keenly
sensitive nature was too delicate for intercourse with the virility of a
Zola or the subtlety of a Goncourt. Paris made of him a realist, and the
world lost by the transformation.

Daudet's love for his native land was intense. Its images were ever
present to him; its poetry haunted him throughout his life. He urged young
men ambitious of literary laurels to remain in their native provinces, to
draw their inspiration from the soil, confident that something great and
beautiful would result. Why did he not take for himself the counsel he so
incessantly offered to others? An untiring curiosity which accompanied a
remarkable acuteness of all the senses, and an emotional and intellectual
receptivity which rendered him quickly and profoundly impressionable,
equipped Daudet to express the poetic spirit of the south in its epic as
well as its lyric qualities. He was aware of this himself. "I believe that
I shall carry away with me," he said, "many curious observations on my
race, its virtues, its faults".[1] And in speaking of the "Lettres de mon
moulin," the only volume of his works in which his southern nature is
given free rein, he says many years after its publication, after he had
written his best novels, "That is still my favorite book."

[Footnote 1: Leon Daudet, "Alphonse Daudet," p. 183; read the whole
chapter. "En lisant Eugenie de Guerin, je m'ecrie: 'Pourquoi n'avoir pas
tous vecu chez nous, dans nos coins?' Comme nos esprits y auraient gagne
au point de vue de l'originalite au sens etymologique du mot, c'est-a-dire
vertu d'origine."--"Notes sur la vie," p. 141.]

Daudet's remarkable power of observation was innate. From his youth he
exercised this instinct and carried a notebook in which he set down
impressions, studies, and sketches of characters and scenes. These
notebooks proved to be of inestimable value to the realist; and the
natural inclination to seek the naked truth, to which they bear witness,
strengthened the determination of the postbellum Daudet to enter the ranks
of the sociological novelists. So far as possible, he borrowed every
detail of character and environment from real life; almost all his
characters represent real persons whom he studied with a view of using
them in his books. Daudet's is a microscopic,