ure, and indeed of
literature in general. There is no doubt that he was admirably equipped
for the great struggle on which he was about to enter; but it may be
also remarked that he had not to fight it out alone and with his own
solitary resources, but found at the very outset useful and strong
auxiliaries. He was to have a powerful though somewhat selfish and
indolent patron in the famous Duke of Morny, who admitted him among his
secretaries before he was twenty years old. Then he had the good fortune
to attract the attention and to take the fancy of Villemessant, the
editor of the Figaro, who at first sight gave him a place in his nursery
of young talents. He had a kind and devoted brother, who cheerfully
shared with him the little money he had to live upon, and thus saved him
from the unspeakable miseries which would inevitably attend a literary
debut at such an early age and under such inauspicious circumstances.
Later on, he was still more fortunate in securing a loving and
intelligent wife, who was to be to him, in the words of the holy
Scriptures, "a companion of his rank," a wife who was not only to become
a help and a comfort, but a literary adviser, a moral guide, and a
second conscience far more strict and exacting than his own; a wife who
taught him how to direct and husband his precious faculties,--how to
turn them to the noblest use and highest ends.

But before that was to come, the first thing was to find a publisher;
and after long looking in vain for one throughout the whole city, he at
last discovered the man he wanted, at his door, in the close vicinity of
that Hotel du Sinat, in the Rue de Tournon, where the two brothers
Daudet had taken up their abode. That publisher was Jules Tardieu,
himself an author of some merit (under the transparent pseudonym of J.
T. de St. Germain): a mild, quiet humorist of the optimistic school, a
Topffer on a small scale and with reduced proportions.

And thus it happened that a few months after the lad's arrival in Paris
an elegant booklet, with the attractive title 'Les Amoureuses' (Women in
Love) printed in red letters on its snow-white cover, made its
appearance under the _galeries de l'Odeon_, where in the absence of
political emotions, the youth of the Quartier was eagerly looking for
literary novelties, and where Daudet himself had been wandering often,
in the hope of an occasional acquaintance with the great critics and
journalists of the day who made the _gale