vencal sort
of play, M. Daudet made up his mind that he must give the public sterner
stuff, and describe the familiar Parisian scenery of streets and quais.
This wise determination was the origin of his novels, "Jack," "Fromont
jeune et Risler aine," and the rest. Up to that time, M. Daudet, M.
Zola, M. Flaubert, and the brothers Goncourt had all been more or less
unpopular authors. It is not long since they had a little club of the
unsuccessful, and M. Daudet was the first of the company who began to
blossom out into numerous editions.

M. Daudet's secret as a novelist, as far as the secret is communicable,
seems to be his wonderfully close study of actual life and his
unscrupulousness in reproducing its details almost without disguise. He
frankly confesses that not only the characters in his political novels,
but those in his other works, are drawn straight from living persons.
The scenery is all sketched from nature, M. Daudet describing the vast
factories with which he was familiar when, at the age of sixteen, he
began to earn his own living, or the interiors to which he was admitted
by virtue of his position under a great man of the late imperial
administration. Places about which he did not know much, and which
needed to be introduced into his tales, M. Daudet visited with his
note-book.

M. Daudet's mode of work is, first, to see his plot and main incidents
clearly, to arrive at a full understanding of his characters, then to
map out his chapters, and then, he says, his fingers tingle to be at
work. He writes rapidly, handing each wet slip of paper to Madame Daudet
for criticism and approval. There is no such sound criticism, he says,
as that of this helpful collaborator, who withal is "so little a woman
of letters."

When a number of chapters are finished M. Daudet finds it well to begin
publishing his novel in a journal. Thus he is obliged to finish within a
certain date; he cannot go back to make alterations; he cannot afford
time to write a page a dozen times over, as a conscientious artist often
wishes to do.

XII.

Traits of Musical Composers.

A long chapter of instances might be penned on the habits of work of
musical composers; such as Gluck's habit of betaking himself with his
harpsichord on a fine day into some grassy field, where the ideas came
to him as fast again as within doors.

Handel, on the contrary, claims to have been inspired for his grandest
compositions by the murmurous d