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The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible colours and visible sounds. This odd suicide of one branch of the realists may serve to remind us of the fact which underlies a very dusty conflict of the critics. All representative art, which can be said to live, is both realistic and ideal; and the realism about which we quarrel is a matter purely of externals.
I mentioned it to M. Gustave Bord, to Frédéric Masson and M. de la Sicotière, and thought no more about it even after the interesting article published in the Temps, by M. Ernest Daudet, until walking one day with Lenôtre in the little that is left of old Paris of the Cité, the house in the Rue Chanoinesse, where Balzac lodged Mme. de la Chanterie, reminded me of Moisson, whose adventure I narrated to Lenôtre, at that time finishing his "Conspiration de la Rouërie."
He was reputed the Emperor's natural half-brother. The breakdown of the Mexican adventure, which was mostly his, contributed not a little to the final Napoleonic fall. He died of dissipation and disappointment, and under the pseudonym of the Duke de Morra, Daudet celebrated him in "The Nabob." De Morny did not live to see the tumble of the house of cards he had built.
In the meantime, Naples, in the hands of the invaders, had been stained with blood, and then ravaged by the great plague of which Boccaccio has given us a picture. Revolting at length under the harsh measures of the Hungarian governor who had been left in charge by Louis, the Neapolitans expelled him and his followers from the city, and sent an urgent invitation to Joanna to return to her former home. Right gladly was the summons answered, and with a goodly retinue of brave knights who had sworn to die in her service she returned to her people, who welcomed her homecoming with unbounded enthusiasm. Now the court resumed its gayety and animation, and again it became, as in the days of King Robert, a far-famed school of courtesy. Alphonse Daudet gives us a hint of all this in his exquisite short story entitled La Mule du Pape, where he tells of the young page Tistet Vedene, qui descendait le Rhône en chantant sur une galère papale et s'en allait
It is not then surprising that Continental critics rank Sapho as its author's greatest production; it is more in order to wonder what Daudet might not have done in this line of work had his health remained unimpaired. The later novels, in which he came near to joining forces with the naturalists and hence to losing some of the vogue his eclecticism gave him, need not detain us.
And they entered together a little summer-house at the foot of the garden. By ALPHONSE DAUDET By slow degrees Sidonie sank to her former level, yes, even lower. From the rich, well-considered bourgeoise to which her marriage had raised her, she descended the ladder to the rank of a mere toy.
The only French novelist whose books have a circulation approaching the works of Daudet and of Zola is Georges Ohnet, a writer whose popularity is as interesting as his stories, because it explains, though it does not excuse, the contempt the Goncourts had for the favor of the great French public, and also because it shows how the highest form of Romanticism still ferments beneath the varnish of Naturalism in what is called genius among the great masses of readers.
Full to the bursting point with its victory, Germany thrived on a sentimental, patriotic literature, thereby poisoning the minds of the country's youth by the glory of conquest and bloodshed. Intellectual Germany had to take refuge in the literature of other countries, in the works of Ibsen, Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, and especially in the great works of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgeniev.
Just at the present moment one does not hear or read a great deal about him, but a similar lull in criticism follows the deaths of most celebrities of whatever kind, and it can scarcely be doubted that Daudet is every day making new friends, while it is as sure as anything of the sort can be that it is death, not estrangement, that has lessened the number of his former admirers.
Daudet once remarked that England was the last of foreign countries to welcome his novels, and that he was surprised at the fact, since for him, as for the typical Englishman, the intimacy of home life had great significance.