it is easy to agree with those critics who think that Daudet's kindly
nature caused him to soften many features of Morny's unlovely character.
Mora does not, indeed, win our love or our esteem, but we confess him to
have been in every respect an exceptional man, and there is not a page
in which he appears that is not intensely interesting. He must be an
unimpressionable reader who soon forgets the death-room scenes, the
destruction of the compromising letters, the spectacular funeral.

Of the other characters there is little space to speak here. Nearly all
have their good points, as might be expected of the creator of his two
fellow Provencals, Numa and Tartarin, the latter being probably the
only really cosmopolitan figure in recent literature; but some, like the
Hemerlingues, verge upon mere sketches; others, like Jansoulet's obese
wife, upon caricatures. The old mother is excellently done, however, and
Monpavon, especially in his suicide, is nothing short of a triumph of
art. It is the more or less romantic or sentimental personages that give
the critic most qualms. Daudet seems to have introduced them--De Gery,
the Joyeuse family, and the rest--as a concession to popular taste, and
on this score was probably justified. A fair case may also be made
out for the use of idyllic scenes as a foil to the tragical, for
the Shakespearian critics have no monopoly of the overworked plea,
"justification by contrast." Nor could a French analogue of Dickens
easily resist the temptation to give us a fatuous Passajon, an
ebullient Pere Joyeuse--who seems to have been partly modelled on a
real person--an exemplary "Bonne Maman," a struggling but eventually
triumphant Andre Maranne. The home-lover Daudet also felt the necessity
of showing that Paris could set the Joyeuse household, sunny in its
poverty, over against the stately elegance of the Mora palace, the walls
of which listened at one and the same moment to the music of a ball and
the death-rattle of its haughty owner. But when all is said, it remains