lf--whatever may have been the reason, Alphonse Daudet
could count before he died thousands of genuine friends in England and
America who were loyal to him in spite of the declining power shown in
his latest books, in spite even of the strain which _Sapho_ laid upon
their Puritan consciences.

It is likely that a majority of these friends were won by the two great
Tartarin books and by the chief novels, _Fromont_, _Jack_, _The Nabob_,
_Kings in Exile_, and _Numa_, aided by the artistic sketches and short
stories contained in _Letters from my Mill_ and _Monday Tales (Contes
du Lundi)_. The strong but overwrought _Evangelist_, _Sapho_--which of
course belongs with the chief novels from the Continental but not from
the insular point of view--and the books of Daudet's decadence, _The
Immortal_, and the rest, cost him few friendships, but scarcely gained
him many. His delightful essays in autobiography, whether in fiction,
_Le Petit Chose (Little What's-his-Name)_, or in _Thirty Years of Paris_
and _Souvenirs of a Man of Letters_, doubtless sealed more friendships
than they made; but they can be almost as safely recommended as the more
notable novels to readers who have yet to make Daudet's acquaintance.

For the man and his career are as unaffectedly charming as his style,
and more of a piece than his elaborate works of fiction. A sunny
Provencal childhood is clouded by family misfortunes; then comes a year
of wretched slavery as usher in a provincial school; then the inevitable
journey to Paris with a brain full of verses and dreams, and the
beginning of a life of Bohemian nonchalance, to which we Anglo-Saxons
have little that is comparable outside the career of Oliver Goldsmith.
But poor Goldsmith had his pride wounded by the editorial tyranny of a
Mrs. Griffiths. Daudet, by a merely pretty poem about a youth and
maiden making love under a plum-tree, won the protection of the Empress
Eugenie, and through her of the Duke de Morny, the prop of the Second
Empire. His life now reads like a fairy-tale inserted by some jocular
elf into that book of dolors entitled _The Lives of Men of Genius_.
A _protege_ of a potentate not usually lavish of his favours, and a
valetudinarian, he is allowed to flit to Algiers and Corsica, to enjoy
his beloved Provence in company with Mistral, to write for the theatres,
and to continue to play the Bohemian. Then the death of Morny seems to
turn the idyl into a tragedy, but only for a moment. Daud