"Little What's-his-name" that a novelist is promoted to the front
rank; and after he had written these two books he remained where he was
before, in the position of a promising young author.

The promise was fulfilled by the publication of "Fromont and
Risler,"--not the best of his novels, but the earliest in which his
full force was displayed. Daudet has told us how this was planned
originally as a play, how the failure of the "Woman of Arles" led him
to relinquish the dramatic form, and how the supposed necessities of
the stage warped the logical structure of the story, turning upon the
intrigues of the young wife the interest which should have been
concentrated upon the partnership, the business rivalry, the mercantile
integrity, whence the novel derived its novelty. The falsifying habit
of thrusting marital infidelity into the foreground of fiction when the
theme itself seems almost to exclude any dwelling on amorous
misadventure, Daudet yielded to only this once; and this is one reason
why a truer view of Parisian life can be found in his pages than in
those of any of his competitors, and why his works are far less
monotonous than theirs.

He is not squeamish, as every reader of "Sapho" can bear witness; but
he does not wantonly choose a vulgar adultery as the staple of his
stories. French fiction, ever since the tale of "Tristan and Yseult"
was first told, has tended to be a poem of love triumphant over every
obstacle, even over honor; and Daudet is a Frenchman with French ideas
about woman and love and marriage; he is not without his share of
Gallic salt; but he is too keen an observer not to see that there are
other things in life than illicit wooings,--business, for example, and
politics, and religion,--important factors all of them in our
complicated modern existence. At the root of him Daudet had a steadfast
desire to see life as a whole and to tell the truth about it
unhesitatingly; and this is a characteristic he shares only with the
great masters of fiction,--essentially veracious, every one of them.

Probably Dickens, frequently as he wrenched the facts of life into
conformity with his rather primitive artistic code, believed that he
also was telling the truth. It is in Daudet's paper explaining how he
came to write "Fromont and Risler" that he discusses the accusation
that he was an imitator of Dickens,--an accusation which seems absurd
enough now that the careers of both writers are closed, and that w