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Updated: June 17, 2025
I see much of the rest of that particular Paris time in the light of the Institution Fezandié, and I see the Institution Fezandié, Rue Balzac, in the light, if not quite of Alphonse Daudet's lean asylum for the petits pays chauds, of which I have felt the previous institutions of New York sketchily remind me, at least in that of certain other of his studies in that field of the precarious, the ambiguous Paris over parts of which the great Arch at the top of the Champs-Elysées flings, at its hours, by its wide protective plausible shadow, a precious mantle of "tone."
Daudet's genial satire, 'Tartarin de Tarascon', appeared in 1872; but with the Parisian romance 'Fromont jeune et Risler aine', crowned by the Academy , he suddenly advanced into the foremost rank of French novelists; it was his first great success, or, as he puts it, "the dawn of his popularity."
But besides these there is a certain number of pure stories works of art which already exist for us, and which illuminate facts and epochs almost without need of sidelights. Such may stand by themselves, or be used with only enough explanation to give background. Probably the best story of this kind known to lovers of modern literature is Daudet's famous La Dernière Classe.
What really most happened no doubt, was that my brother and I should both come away with a mind prepared for a perfect assimilation of Alphonse Daudet's chronicle of "Jack," years and years later on; to make the acquaintance in that work of the "petits pays chauds" among whom Jack learnt the first lessons of life was to see the Institution Vergnès at once revive, swarming as it did with small homesick Cubans and Mexicans; the complete failure of blondness that marks the memory is doubtless the cumulative effect of so many of the New York "petits pays chauds," preponderantly brown and black and conducing to a greasy gloom.
Most young fellows of my age have some sort of career before them, while I I really am what you said I was, an idler. I didn't like the taunt from your lips; but it was true. Well, I am going to change all that. I am tired of posturing as one of Daudet's 'Kings in Exile. We expelled potentates all live in Paris; that is the irony of it. I want to be candid with you, Joan.
How, then, could one expect poor Clothilde to yield up her undersized, thin-moustached, and very unheroic-looking Henri, having seen him four times? There was one way out of her troubles, that to which Alphonse Daudet's and André Theuriet's people gravitate as needles to their pole. She walked one dark midnight upon the jetty alone.
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.
The theme is akin to that of Daudet's L'Evangéliste; but Kielland, as it appears to me, has in this instance outdone his French confrère as regards insight into the peculiar character and poetry of the pietistic movement. He has dealt with it as a psychological and not primarily as a pathological phenomenon. A comparison with Daudet suggests itself constantly in reading Kielland.
There was a brown combination writing desk and book-shelf which was arrayed with some of the most curious volumes Pater's "Marius the Epicurean," Daudet's "Wives of Men of Genius," Richard Jefferies' "Story of My Heart," Stevenson's "Aes Triplex," "The Kasidah" of Richard Burton, "The House of Life" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Also sprach Zarathustra" by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Leo, when we reach Girgenti, the remaining Mecca of your historic hopes, some time to-morrow, you will understand why, instead of climbing to the temples of the cliff, I shall lock the door of our cabin, and drown the bellowing of the beast in Daudet's new book."
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