author strove to explain his somewhat curious
theories on the laws of heredity. Having originally been intended for
the medical profession, he takes a special interest in this subject. It
is curious that three such distinct and different literary gifts should
exist simultaneously in the same family.

As soon as even the cool, narrow streets of the Quartier Latin begin to
grow dusty and sultry with summer heat, the whole Daudet family emigrate
to the novelist's charming country cottage at Champrosay. There old
friends, such as M. Edmond de Goncourt, are ever made welcome, and life
is one long holiday for those who bring no work with them. Daudet
himself has described his country home as being "situated thirty miles
from Paris, at a lovely bend of the Seine, a provincial Seine invaded by
bulrushes, purple irises, and water-lilies, bearing on its bosom tufts
of grass, and clumps of tangled roots, on which the tired dragon-flies
alight, and allow themselves to be lazily floated down the stream."

[Illustration: THE DRAWING ROOM.]

It was in a round, ivy-clad pavilion overhanging the river that _le
maitre du logis_ wrote _L'Immortel_. On an exceptionally fine day he
would get into a canoe, and let it drift among the reeds, till, in the
shadow of an old willow-tree, the boat became his study, and the two
crossed oars his desk. Strange that so bitter and profoundly cynical a
study of modern Paris life should have been evolved in such
surroundings, whilst the _Contes de Mon Moulin_, and many other of his
most ideal _nouvelles_, were written in the sombre grey house where M.
and Madame Daudet lived during many years of their early married life.

The author of _Les Rois en Exile_ has not yet utilised Champrosay as a
background to any of his stories; he takes notes, however, of all that
goes on in the little village community, much as he did in the Duc de
Morny's splendid palace, and in time his readers may have the pleasure
of perusing an idyllic yet realistic picture of French country life, an
outcome of his summer experiences.

Alphonse Daudet was born just fifty-three years ago in the sunlit, white
_batisse_ at Nimes, which he has described in the painful, melancholy
history of his childhood, entitled _Le Petit Chose_. At an age when
other French boys are themselves _lyceans_, he became usher in a kind of
provincial Dotheboys Hall; and some idea of what the sensitive, poetical
lad went through may be gained by the fact th