, for whose authenticity the
author vouches, but who seems out of place in "Kings in Exile," like a
fantastic invention, such as Balzac sometimes permitted himself as a
relief from his rigorous realism.

For incident as well as for character Daudet goes to real life. The
escape of Colette from under the eyes of her father-in-law,--that
actually happened; but none the less does it fit into "Kings in Exile."
And Colette's cutting off her hair in grief at her husband's
death,--that actually happened also; but it belongs artistically in the
"Immortal." On the other hand, the fact which served as the foundation
of the "Immortal"--the taking in of a _savant_ by a lot of forged
manuscripts--has been falsified by changing the _savant_ from a
mathematician (who might easily be deceived about a matter of
autographs) to a historian (whose duty it is to apply all known tests
of genuineness to papers purporting to shed new light on the past).
This borrowing from the newspaper has its evident advantages, but it
has its dangers also, even in the hands of a poet as adroit as Daudet
and as imaginative. Perhaps the story of his which is most artistic in
its telling, most shapely, most harmonious in its modulations of a
single theme to the inevitable end, developed without haste and without
rest, is "Sapho;" and "Sapho" is the novel of Daudet's in which there
seems to be the least of this stencilling of actual fact, in which the
generalization is the broadest, and in which the observation is least
restricted to single individuals.

But in "Sapho" the theme itself is narrow, narrower than in "Numa
Roumestan," and far narrower than in either "The Nabob" or "Kings in
Exile;" and this is why "Sapho," fine as it is, and subtle, is perhaps
less satisfactory. No other French novelist of the final half of the
nineteenth century, not Flaubert, not Goncourt, not M. Zola, not
Maupassant, has four novels as solid as these, as varied in incident,
as full of life, as rich in character, as true. They form the
quadrilateral wherein Daudet's fame is secure.

"Sapho" is a daughter of the "Lady of the Camellias," and a
grand-daughter of "Manon Lescaut,"--Frenchwomen, all of them, and of a
class French authors have greatly affected. But Daudet's book is not a
specimen of what Lowell called "that _corps-de-ballet_ literature in
which the most animal of the passions is made more temptingly naked by
a veil of French gauze." It is at bottom a moral book, much