"Letters from my Mill," and the "Monday
Tales," but not the same playfulness and fun. They are severe studies,
all of them; and they all illustrate the truth of Bagehot's saying that
a man's mother might be his misfortune, but his wife was his fault. It
is a rosary of marital infelicities that Daudet has strung for us in
this volume, and in every one of them the husband is expiating his
blunder. With ingenious variety the author rings the changes on one
theme, on the sufferings of the ill-mated poet or painter or sculptor,
despoiled of the sympathy he craves, and shackled even in the exercise
of his art. And the picture is not out of drawing, for Daudet can see
the wife's side of the case also; he can appreciate her bewilderment at
the ugly duckling whom it is so difficult for her to keep in the nest.
The women have made shipwreck of their lives too, and they are
companions in misery, if not helpmeets in understanding. This is
perhaps the saddest of all Daudet's books, the least relieved by humor,
the most devoid of the gaiety which illumines the "Letters from my
Mill" and the first and second "Tartarin" volumes. But it is also one
of the most veracious; it is life itself firmly grasped and honestly
presented.

It is not matrimonial incongruity at large in all its shifting aspects
that Daudet here considers; it is only the married unhappiness of the
artist, whatever his mode of expression, and whichever of the muses he
has chosen to serve; it is only the wedded life of the man incessantly
in search of the ideal, and never relaxing in the strain of his
struggle with the inflexible material from which he must shape his
vision of existence. Not only in this book, but in many another has
Daudet shown that he perceives the needs of the artistic temperament,
its demands, its limitations and its characteristics. There is a
playwright in "Rose and Ninette;" there is a painter in the "Immortal;"
there is an actor in "Fromont and Risler;" there are a sculptor, a
poet, and a novelist on the roll of the heroine's lovers in "Sapho."
Daudet handles them gently always, unless they happen to belong to the
theatre. Toward the stage-folk he is pitiless; for all other artists he
has abundant appreciation; he is not blind to their little weaknesses,
but these he can forgive even though he refuses to forget; he is at
home with them. He is never patronizing, as Thackeray is, who also
knows them and loves them. Thackeray's attitude is that o