long the youthful volume of 'Les
Amoureuses.' In those days, when Coquelin's monologues and _saynetes_
were yet unknown, the brothers Lionnet, then in the height of their
vogue, delighted the drawing-rooms with the miniature masterpiece.

Still, those who had prophesied the advent of a new poet were doomed to
disappointment. Every one knows what Sainte-Beuve once said about the
short-lived existence, in most of us, of a poet whom the real man is to
survive. Shall we say that this was the case with Daudet, who never, as
far as the world knows, wrote verses after twenty-five? No; the poet was
not to die in him, but lived on and lives still to this day. Only he has
always written in prose.

After his successful debut, Daudet felt his way in different directions.
In collaboration with M. Ernest Lepine, who has since made a reputation
under the name of Quatrelles, he had a drama, 'The Last Idol' performed
at the Odeon theatre,--at that same Odeon which in his first days of
Paris seems to have been the centre of his life and of his ambitions.
But he more frequently appeared before the public as a journalist and a
humorist, a writer of light articles and short stories. Nothing can give
a more true, more vivacious, and on the whole more favorable impression
of the Daudet of the period than the 'Lettres de Mon Moulin' (Letters
from My Windmill). They owe their title to an old deserted windmill
where Alphonse Daudet seems to have lived some time in complete
seclusion, forgetting, or trying to forget, the excitement of Parisian
life. The preface, most curiously disguised under the form of a mock
contract which is supposed to transfer the ownership from the old
proprietor to the poet, and professes to give the _etat de lieux_ or
description of the place, is an amusing parody of legal jargon. The next
chapter describes the installation of the new master in the same happy
vein, with all the odd circumstances attending it.

Throughout the rest of the volume, Daudet disappears and reappears, as
his fancy prompts him to do. Now he lets himself be carried back to past
memories and distant places; now he gives us a mediaeval tale or a
domestic drama of to-day compressed into a few brief pages, or a picture
of rural life, or a glimpse of that literary hell from which he had just
escaped and to which he was soon to return. He changed his tone and his
subject with amazing versatility, from the bitterest satire to idyllic
sweetness, or to a