s 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