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Updated: June 17, 2025
Their position reminds me of Alphonse Daudet's immortal creation, Tartarin de Tarascon, with a double nature, partly that of Don Quixote and partly of Sancho Panza, at one moment urged on by the glory, and at the next held back by the prospect of the hardships, of lion-hunting in Africa "Couvre toi de gloire," dit Tartarin Quichotte, "Couvre toi de flanelle dit Tartarin Sancho."
Most people must be familiar with Alphonse Daudet's immortal work, Tartarin de Tarascon, in which the typical "Meridional" of Southern France is portrayed with such unerring exactitude that Daudet himself, after writing the book, was never able to set foot in Tarascon again. Here, with the exception of Tartarin himself, the counterparts of all Daudet's characters were to be found.
Daudet's story of his childhood in "Le Pape est mort." There seem to be five different sources for the original deposition of young Robinson. Thomas Wright, Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, II, 112-114, has given the story from a copy of this and of other depositions in Lord Londesborough's MSS. Webster prints a third copy, Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, 347-349.
We keep the "Decameron" and Daudet's eroticisms under lock and key; yet they are only "suggestive," while this is frankly feculent, a brazen bid for bawdry.
Then the death of Morny seems to turn the idyl into a tragedy, but only for a moment. Daudet's delicate, nervous beauty made his friend Zola think of an Arabian horse, but the poet had also the spirit of such a high-bred steed.
If such a study of the femme collante, the mistress who cannot be shaken off or rather of the man whom she ruins, for it is Gaussin, not Sapho, that is the main subject of Daudet's acute analysis was to be written at all, it had to be written with a resolute art such as Daudet applied to it.
He survived the Empire, and his relatives are said to have been incensed at the treatment given him in the novel, an attitude on their part which is explicable but scarcely justifiable, since Daudet's sympathy for his hero could not well have been greater, and since the adventurer had already attained a notoriety that was not likely to be completely forgotten.
There is little attempt at dramatic force in it, and the one scene in which the note of pathos is attempted is perhaps the least successful in the whole opera. But the lighter portions of the work are irresistible. 'Mireille' has much of the charm of Daudet's Provençal stories, the charm of warmth and colour, independent of subject. More than one version of the opera exists.
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 life, and gradually destroyed his powers of locomotion. It spared the functions of the brain, but it cannot be denied that after 1884 something of force and spontaneous charm was lacking in Daudet's books.
If this were a general essay and not an introduction, it would be proper to say something of Daudet's early attempts as poet and dramatist.
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