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"Ihxvt trod the upward
and tie downward dope;
Aad I have endured
and dose todays before;
I have loafed for all
aad bid farewell to hope:
Aad I have lived aad loved
aad shut the door."
Robert Xouk Stevenson.
to recall the incident to Mnie. Brohan
Alphonse Daudet's funeral was one and she said it must be a mistake, she
of the dramatic-events of the season wUykmrw Daudet throughhTsbooks.
in Paris. A demonstration which The long-haired Provencal youth who
could have occurred only in the cap- broke her wine glasses she had for
itol of the world of letters. With gotten. A Parisian wit of the last
honors such as other nations pay only decade once remarked: "Whenever I
to kings, they bore him through the meet a particularly stupid boy from
streets of Paris, that same Paris to the South I have a horror for him, for
which he came from the South some I am haunted by the fear that he will
"forty years ago, a boy of eighteen with become great."
a bundle of manuscript and forty sous
in his pocket. Ah, what labors Hercu- When Daudet's first play, "La Der
lean! what battles and what triumphs nier Idole," was brought out in Paris
lay between that entrance and that he had been ordered out of France for
cxjtj his health. On the very night of its
That he died in his prime, before first production lie was in the further
his glorious powers had failed him, end of Algeria living with a couple of
before the cold of age had chilled the Arabs in a tent under a clump of
hot boy's heart of him, is only another dwarf palms, and lay looking through
proof that Fortune loved him with a the flap at the burning orient stare,
more enduring constancy than is her longing for Paris. The telegram an
wont. Ifot for him was the pitiable nouncing its magnificent success was
weakening so often attendant upon brought to him across the desert by a
the age of genius, the senile vagaries Ted-coated horseman riding at full
and folliesttue ossification of imagina- gallop. Immediately he was Jseized
tioti,M.he'blind gropitig for a dead in- wfth the fever Tor' Paris, that city
spiration. When Alphonse Daudet which all the geniuses of France have
said adieu to life and art, the warm equally loathed and loved, from which
kiss of youth was yet upon his lips, they are always fleeing but never
God send us all good ending! escaping. Daudet was annually taken
with a revulsion for the place; always
And he had lived: No man of his wandering back to the South; living
time more deeply and more richly, now in complete isolation in a light
He was the Jforth and the South, the house with only the sea birds for com
Provencaland the Parisian, the Bo- pany, now in a windmill in Provencal,
hemian and the man of family. He now in the desert. But the end of
went through the noisy bazaar, among every journey was Paris. Once, when
the Iving merchantmen and bought he was working in an old farm house
only what was precious.
The story of his first experiences in
Paris, Daudet himself wrote ten years
ago; how he went there in a third-
class railway carriage, penned in with
a crowd of drunken sailors, and how,
on arriving with a capital of forty
sous he enters the profession of let-
ters. He lived in an attic the most
commonplace thing he ever did on
the fifth floor of the Hotel du Senat in
the Rue de Tournon with a horde of
hot-blooded young Southerners like
himself, araone whom was Gambetta.
All were desperately poor; all confi
dently expected to become famous,
and all were citizens of that "Bohemia
of the roarinc Forties." not then ex-
tinct in Paris, which Mcugerdescribed
as "an intermediate stage which leads should have married the woman he
either to the morgue or the Acad- loved and should have loved her
emy." It was from this corner of the through a life-time. As he wrote of
Latin quarter that, when Ire had it years afterward: "I married! How
neither fire nor breakfast and afi Paris ever did that happen? To what magic
was wrapped in foj, Daudet used to art did such a wild gypsey as I fall a
steal out to watch the great dome of victim? What spell was cast over me?
the Odeon emirge slowly from the What charm was strong enough to
mist, that Odean where the audierce bind fast my once cvcr-changingca-was
one day to rise when he entered, price."
It was from there, too, that, attired
in his first dress coat, he went to his By the Engl ish-speaking world Dau
firet reception at the home of Augus- det is known chjefly as a novelist; in
tine Brohan, the actress. He told in France his rank'-as a dramatist is
his "Thirty Years in Paris" what almost as high The only one of his
agonies of bashfulness he suffered on dramas which has been produced in
that occasion and how, in spite of his America is "L'Arlesienni," which
gnawing hunger, he could not eat, Minnie Maddern Fiske played under
'and in trying to get a drink of water the rather inadequate title of "The
"upset a decanter and tray of glasses Liar." Beside his work as a play
indsent them crashing to tbe floor, wright Daudet did -a great deal for the
After this embarrassing mishap he French stage in criticisms. He was
CATHER.
!
made his escape as soon as possible
and trudged homeward through the
6nowy streets with no overcoat and
with the icy wind whistling through
the tails of that sacred dress coat,
stopping on his way at the market to
drink a bowl of cabbage soup among
the ttsh-mongers and venders of veg
etables. Years afterward Sarcey tried
down in the Rhone country, a reporter
from Paris came down to write up a
country fair and dropped intobivak-
fast with Daudet. Daudet had never
seen him before, but as they talked of
the happenings on the boulevards that
unnamable fever for the city came
over him, and though he was just in
the middle of "Le Petit Chose,' and
knew that he could never finish it
away f mm the Rhone valley, by night-
fall he was on his way back to Paris,
This delightful vagabondage, half
the restlessness of a boy, half the
caprice of a poet, was never quieted
until his marriage. What a superb
piece of irony that the man who wrote
"Les Femmes dArtistes'' and so bit-
terly condemned marriage for artiste,
BUI
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ITIHmbv bbB
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SHAW,
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1
I
"Western Representatives, 130 So 13th st.
the first critic in Paris to demand a
scientific mise-en-scene, and he wrote
the first history of dramatic criticism
in France. It was he who first desig
nated Napoleon I. as the benefactor
of the French stage and the father of
modern criticism.
To place Daudet in the front rank
of French novelists, with Balzac and
de Maupassant and Flaubert, is to do
him an injustice; it is applying a
measure too large for hiin. Between
tlleirworks and-his there is that same
indefinable shade of difference that
you find between the pictures of Millet
and those of Jules Breton. He had
neither their technical mastery nor
their elemental power. They were
the giants of letters, those three, and
this was only a gay troubadour from
the South, with a lute as sweet as a
nightingale's note and a song always
dipping from laughter to tears. He
left no novel which, in days to come,
will carry the conviction and power of
"Notre Coeur ' or "Madame Bovary"
or "Cousin Pons." He has place among
the men who, from the recesses of a
single brain, fashioned a world, and
who created a humanity of their own.
He was a temperamental artist. He
was not profound either in his obser
vations of life or his interpretation of
it. He saw the beauty which glitters
upen the surface and reproduced it
with a delicacy, a pleasure, a vivid
ness only possiblp.to a temperament so
alert, so capricious, so exqu'sitely sen
sitive. Sentiment continually tempt
ed him and he was often dramatic
before he was true. He had a thirsty,
never-satisfied eagerness for life and
art. He could perfectly reproduce all
experiences; he described things utter
ly inexpressible; he mastered the lan
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a
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WEGMAN,
JEWETT.
D
guage of sensations. That very ever
present personal quality which dis
qualifies him for a place among the
greatest creators of fiction, is his most
potent and persistent charm. He con
quered by the element which was his
weakness; he made his deficiencies
gloriously triumphant. "O, wind and
fire of the South, ye are irresistible!''
"Kings in Exile' will always be
Daudet's most popular work in the
Anglo-Saxon world. Hen ryjJames says
that it is "a book that could have been
produced only in one of these later
years of grace. Such a book is in
tensely modern, and the author is in
every way an essentially modern
genius."
But once and only once did Daudet
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