e with readers of all sorts and
conditions,--this unique combination of imagination and verity. "His
originality," M. Jules Lemaitre has acutely remarked, "is closely to
unite observation and fantasy, to extract from the truth all that it
contains of the improbable and the surprising, to satisfy at the same
time the readers of M. Cherbuliez and the readers of M. Zola, to write
novels which are at the same time realistic and romantic, and which
seem romantic only because they are very sincerely and very profoundly
realistic."

II.

Alphonse Daudet was born in 1840, and it was at Nimes that he first
began to observe mankind; and he has described his birthplace and his
boyhood in "Little What's-his-name," a novel even richer in
autobiographical revelation than is "David Copperfield." His father was
a manufacturer whose business was not prosperous and who was forced at
last to remove with the whole family to Lyons in the vain hope of doing
better in the larger town. After reading the account of this parent's
peculiarities in M. Ernest Daudet's book, we are not surprised that the
affairs of the family did not improve, but went from bad to worse.
Alphonse Daudet suffered bitterly in these years of desperate struggle,
but he gained an understanding of the conditions of mercantile life, to
be serviceable later in the composition of "Fromont and Risler."

When he was sixteen he secured a place as _pion_ in a boarding school
in the Cevennes,--_pion_ is a poor devil of a youth hired to keep watch
on the boys. How painful this position was to the young poet can be
read indirectly in "Little What's-his-name," but more explicitly in the
history of that story, printed now in "Thirty Years of Paris." From
this remote prison he was rescued by his elder brother, Ernest, who was
trying to make his way in Paris and who sent for Alphonse as soon as he
had been engaged to help an old gentleman in writing his memoirs. The
younger brother has described his arrival in Paris, and his first
dress-coat and his earliest literary acquaintances. Ernest's salary was
seventy-five francs a month, and on this the two brothers managed to
live; no doubt fifteen dollars went further in Paris in 1857 than they
will in 1899.

In those days of privation and ambition Daudet's longing was to make
himself famous as a poet; and when at last, not yet twenty years old,
he began his career as a man of letters it was by the publication of a
volume of verse, jus