Provencal childhood is clouded by family misfortunes; then comes a year
of wretched slavery as usher in a provincial school; then the inevitable
journey to Paris with a brain full of verses and dreams, and the
beginning of a life of Bohemian nonchalance, to which we Anglo-Saxons
have little that is comparable outside the career of Oliver Goldsmith.
But poor Goldsmith had his pride wounded by the editorial tyranny of a
Mrs. Griffiths. Daudet, by a merely pretty poem about a youth and
maiden making love under a plum-tree, won the protection of the Empress
Eugenie, and through her of the Duke de Morny, the prop of the Second
Empire. His life now reads like a fairy-tale inserted by some jocular
elf into that book of dolors entitled _The Lives of Men of Genius_.
A _protege_ of a potentate not usually lavish of his favours, and a
valetudinarian, he is allowed to flit to Algiers and Corsica, to enjoy
his beloved Provence in company with Mistral, to write for the theatres,
and to continue to play the Bohemian. Then the death of Morny seems to
turn the idyl into a tragedy, but only for a moment. Daudet's delicate,
nervous beauty made his friend Zola think of an Arabian horse, but
the poet had also the spirit of such a high-bred steed. Years of
conscientious literary labour followed, cheered by marriage with a woman
of genius capable of supplementing him in his weakest points, and then
the war with Prussia and its attendant horrors gave him the larger and
deeper view of life and the intensified patriotism--in short, the final
stimulus he needed. From the date of his first great success--_Fromont,
Jr., and Risler, Sr._--glory and wealth flowed in upon him, while
envy scarcely touched him, so unspoiled was he and so continuously and
eminently lovable. One seemed to see in his career a reflection of his
luminous nature, a revised myth of the golden touch, a new version of
the fairy-tale of the fair mouth dropping pearls. Then, as though grown
weary of the idyllic romance she was composing, Fortune donned the
tragic robes of Nemesis. Years of pain followed, which could not abate