Tartarin de Tarascon

Alphonse Daudet was born in the ancient Provençal city of Nîmes, near the Rhône, May 13, 1840. In this same year Émile Zola, destined like Daudet to pass his youth in Provence, was born at Paris.

As a result of the commercial upheaval which attended the revolution of 1848, Daudet's father, a wealthy silk manufacturer, was ruined. After a hard struggle he was forced to give up his business at Nîmes and moved to Lyons (1849). He was not successful here, and finally, in 1856, the family was broken up. The sons now had to shift for themselves.

These first sixteen years of Alphonse Daudet's life were far from unhappy. He had found delight in exploring the abandoned factory at Nîmes. His school days at Lyons were equally agreeable to the young vagabond. His studies occupied him little; he loved to wander through the streets of the great city, finding everywhere food for fanciful speculation. He would follow a person he did not know, scrutinizing his every movement, and striving to lose his own identity in that of the other, to live the other's life. His frequent days of truancy he spent in these idle rambles, or in drifting down the river. Literary ambition had already seized him; he had written a novel (of which no trace remains) and numerous verses. Notwithstanding his lack of application to study, he had succeeded in completing the course of the lycée.

In 1856 when it became certain that the father could no longer care for the family, the mother and daughter took refuge in the home of relatives; Ernest, the older of the two surviving sons, sought his fortune in the literary circles of Paris; and Alphonse accepted a position as "master of the study hall" (maître d'études, pion) at the college of Alais in the Cévennes. The boy was too young, too delicate, and too sensitive to be able to endure the mental suffering and humiliation to which he was subjected at the hands of the bullies of this school.[1] After a year of martyrdom he set out on his terrible journey to Paris. Here he was welcomed by his brother Ernest.

[Footnote 1: See "Le Petit Chose," "Little What's-His-Name."]

The two brothers had always felt and always continued to feel the closest sympathy for each other. Ernest believed in Alphonse's genius more than in his own, and bestowed on his younger brother the motherly devotion which Alphonse so gratefully and tenderly acknowledges in "Le Petit Chose," his romantic autobiography, where Ernest appears as "ma mère Jacques."

The first years in Paris were the darkest in the brothers' lives. They could earn scarcely enough to satisfy their most pressing needs, but both were happy, since they were in Paris. Before Alphonse's arrival Ernest had secured regular employment on a newspaper. Alphonse was longing for recognition as a poet, but to earn his living he was forced to turn to prose. His contributions to Le Figaro and other newspapers soon made him known. He wrote little and carefully, nor did he forget his literary ideals even when poverty might have excused hurried productions in the style best calculated to sell. His literary conscience was as strong under the trying circumstances of his debut as later when success brought independence.[2]

[Footnote 2: See E. Daudet, "_Mon Frère et moi_," pp. 151-152. Daudet frequently says of himself that he was by nature an improviser, that the labor of meticulous composition to which he forced himself was a torture, yet he remained always true to his ideal.]

During this period he lived among the Bohemians of the Parisian world of letters; but, though he shared their joys and sorrows, he seems to have emerged unscathed from the dangers of such an existence. Zola met Daudet at this time and has left us an attractive picture of him: "He was in the employ of a successful newspaper, he used to bring in his article, receive his remuneration, and disappear with the nonchalance of a young god, sunk in poetry, far from the petty cares of this world. He was living, I think, outside of the city, in a remote corner with other poets, a band of joyous Bohemians. He was beautiful, with the delicate, nervous beauty of an Arabian horse, an ample mane, a silky divided beard, large eyes, a thin nose, a passionate mouth, and, to crown all that, a certain flash of light, a breath of tender voluptuousness, which bathed his whole face in a smile that was both roguish and sensual. There was in him something of the Parisian Street gamin and something of the Oriental woman."[1]

[Footnote 1: "Les Romanciers naturalistes," pp. 256-257.]

Daudet's first volume was a collection of verse, "Les Amoureuses" (1858, published by Tardieu, a Provençal). These simple poems are charming in their freshness and naïveté, and established Daudet's reputation as a writer of light verse. The whole volume, and especially "Les Prunes," attracted the attention of the Empress Eugénie. At her solicitation Daudet was made one of the secretaries of the powerful Duke of Morny, president of the corps législatif (1860). His duties were purely nominal. He now had money enough to keep the wolf from his door and was free to devote himself to literature.

It was at this time that the stage began to attract him. His first play, "La Dernière Idole," was produced at the Odéon in 1862. Almost every other year between 1862 and 1892 a new play, on untried themes, or adapted from one of his novels and usually written in collaboration, appeared at a Parisian theater. Of all these only one, "L'Arlésienne" (1872), is worthy of its author.

Already in 1859, as a result of the suffering of the preceding years and lack of precautions, his health had begun to fail. He spent the winters of 1861-1864 in Algeria, Corsica, and Provence. These voyages were of vital importance in his development. He learned something of the world and became better 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.