(Les lettres de mon moulin est un recueil de contes publié...)
Les lettres de mon moulin est un recueil de contes publié en 1869 et qui fonda la réputation de l'auteur. Il annonce les divers romans que Alphonse Daudet allait bientôt consacrer à la Provence et qui sont le meilleur de son uvre.Daudet fut jusqu'à sa mort atteint de nostalgie, au point de se sentir à Paris l'âme d'un proscrit. S'étant toujours passionné pour la vie méridionale, il s'est complu à en écrire les moindres aspects : ballades en prose, histoires naïves, paraboles, contes fantastiques et drolatiques, sans oublier le paysage. Un préambule nous apprend que le poète a fait l'acquisition d'un vieux moulin provençal afin de pouvoir donner carrière à ses rêveries. C'est là qu'il griffonera la trentaine de Lettres dont se compose le volume. Outre L'Arlésienne dont il devait tirer un drame, les plus connus de ses contes sont les suivants : La chèvre de Monsieur Seguin, Le secret de maître Cornille, La mule du pape, Le curé de Cucugnan, Le sous-préfet aux champs, La légende de l'homme à la cervelle d'or, L'élixir du R.P. Gaucher, etc.Dans chacun de ces contes, s'inscrit un aspect du caractère provencal. Si le paysage y joue un grand rôle, il n'ôte jamais rien au mérite des figures. Ce que l'on goûte surtout ici, c'est un mélange incomparable de malice, de verve et d'émotion. Mais leur qualité première restera cette sympathie avec laquelle l'auteur s'attache aux humbles, aux bêtes et aux plantes, avec une sollicitude qui ne désarme jamais. Le travail est celui d'un " orfèvre " qui, d'un seul trait de la plus grande finesse, peut créer un climat et cerner un personnage dont le relief lui permettra de demeurer légendaire. C'est cette simplicité et cet art de ne jamais " appuyer " sur toute chose qui en ont fait un de nos plus grands conteurs.
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( Or, on sait bien peu que si Alphonse Daudet entreprit l...)
Or, on sait bien peu que si Alphonse Daudet entreprit le voyage du retour vers le Midi, dont il était natif (Nîmes, 1840), c'est parce que déjà, alors qu'il n'avait qu'une vingtaine d'années, il souffrait de la syphillis, compliquée par une tuberculose. Le mal incurable ne cessa jamais. A compter de 1887, et jusqu'en 1895 - soit deux ans avant sa mort -, il tient le journal intime de cette « doulou », douleur qui l'accompagne depuis sa jeunesse. Pudique, il enregistre les progrès de cette maladie honteuse à laquelle il fait à peine allusion. Il imagine de transformer le récit de ses souffrances quotidiennes en un roman. Il n'en aura pas le temps. Ce sont ses enfants, Léon et Lucien, sa femme (et collaboratrice), Julia Allart, et son dernier secrétaire André Ebner qui en assureront l'édition posthume, en 1930. Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) demeure la victime d'une lecture restrictive et abusive de son oeuvre. L'école de la Troisième République a fait la fortune de deux de ses oeuvres de jeunesse, Les Lettres de mon moulin (1869), puis Tartarin de Tarascon (1872) - il avait respectivement 29 et 32 ans lors de leur publication -, au détriment de son oeuvre romanesque.
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(Passionate, calculating, only sometimes honourable but al...)
Passionate, calculating, only sometimes honourable but always honest, Fanny Legrand is one of the great female characters in literature. Nothing could be more shocking to Jean Gaussin, a serious young student from the provinces, than the moral swamp his mistress has been living in before they met. Sculptor's model, poet's muse, Fanny Legrand has seen and done it all in the twenty years since her first lover, Caoudal, cast in bronze the girl from the Paris gutter and named her Sappho. But revulsion is no match for lust; and little by little, despite continual outbreaks of rage and jealousy, Jean is able to live with Fanny's disgraceful past, to find a certain pleasure in the degraded domesticity of their life together and even to feel a degree of pride in his new connections with famous men. The arrival on the scene of a marriageable young girl seems to offer Jean the escape route he needs: but he cannot bring himself to deal his ageing mistress a potentially fatal blow. Alphonse Daudet's waspishly good-humoured but chilling novel takes Jean on a journey he could never have foreseen.
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(Qui ne connait pas l'illustrissime Tartarin, immortalisé ...)
Qui ne connait pas l'illustrissime Tartarin, immortalisé au cinéma par Raimu? Mais... au cas où, voici le résumé du début de cette aventure épique, et, pour tout dire, tarasconnaise... Tartarin possède un jardin exotique où il entretient un baobab dans un pot de réséda, de nombreuses armes et quantité de livres d'aventures. À Tarascon, les chasseurs sans gibier tirent sur leur casquette, après l'avoir lancée en l'air. Chacun dans le voisinage reconnaît que Tartarin est un vrai caractère, prêt à repousser toutes les attaques (qui ne viennent pas...). Il n'a jamais quitté Tarascon, mais l'arrivée d'une ménagerie et d'un lion en cage l'incite à partir pour l'Atlas... Alphonse Daudet, né le 13 mai 1840 à Nîmes dans le département du Gard et mort le 16 décembre 1897 (à 57 ans) à Paris, est un écrivain et auteur dramatique français.
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(Tartarin de tarascon)
Tartarin de tarascon
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( Pain, you must be everything for me. Let me find in yo...)
Pain, you must be everything for me. Let me find in you all those foreign lands you will not let me visit. Alphonse Daudet In the Land of PainAlphonse Daudets poignant, humorous, and piercing reflections on his years of enduring severe illnessis a classic in the literary annals of human suffering. Daudet (18401897) was a greatly admired writer during his lifetime, praised by Dickens and Henry James. In the prime of his life, he developed an agonizing nerve disease caused by syphilis and began taking notes about his experience, published posthumously as In the Land of Pain. Daudet wrote in powerful, unflinching images about his excruciating symptoms, his fears, his desperate attempts at treatment, and the effects of the morphine he came to depend on. His novelists eye and sense of humor did not desert him as he observed the bizarre society of his fellow patients at curative spas, nor did his generosity and compassion for them and for his friends and family. In Julian Barness crystalline translation, Daudets notes comprise a recordat once shattering, haunting, and beguilingof both the banal and the transformative realities of physical suffering.
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(Little What's-His-Name (Le Petit Chose) - Alphonse Daudet...)
Little What's-His-Name (Le Petit Chose) - Alphonse Daudet's (1840-1897) first published, though not his first written, novel - appeared in 1868. The first part was composed in that Southern France it describes so charmingly; its first chapters form one of the most touching of autobiographies. In the second part Daudet has to tell of the struggles of an idealistic young poet in the selfish, devouring whirlpool of Paris. The whole book seems to bear the impress of the circumstances under which it was written. It is full of the milk of human kindness. --- When Daudet wrote Le Petit Chose in his early manhood, he succeeded in producing one of the most delightfully idyllic of his works, one that will probably continue to be read as long as any of the more powerful novels of his prime. It is one of the most perfect representations in literature of childhood's hopes and fears and of youth's aspirations and defeats. It is perfect because it is real. --- Enjoy to the full one of the purest and most exquisite stories of youthful experience to be found in French or in any other literature. (W. P. Trent)
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Daudet was born on May 13, 1840 in Nîmes, France. As a child Alphonse Daudet experienced the heady delights of a sun-drenched Provence and the darkening contrasts of his family's steadily worsening financial condition. His father, a silk manufacturer, had to abandon business there in 1849, moving the family north to Lyons; never fully recovering from the depression which followed the Revolution of 1848, the Daudets finally lost everything in 1857.
The family became scattered, and Alphonse—never an enthusiastic student—found himself miserably placed as a pion, or monitor, in a provincial Collège.
After a few months he was rescued by his elder brother Ernest, who brought him to Paris and generously encouraged the boy's already evident literary talents. A collection of undistinguished love verses, Les Amoureuses, represented a most traditional debut for Alphonse, but again through his brother's influence he was directed by the opportunities of journalism to contribute prose chroniques, stylish social sketches, which won him entry to the prestigious Figaro (1859); already in these early compositions, a mixture of what critics have called "rose-water fantasy" and often sharp satire reveals Daudet's most characteristic modes: sentimentality and imaginative flight.
Until 1865 the young Daudet enjoyed financial security as a comfortable undersecretary to the Duc de Morny—a position accorded, in almost fairy tale manner, by a chance notice of the Empress Eugénie. In these years he collaborated in writing a number of one-act plays (La Dernière idole, 1862; Les Absents, 1864; L'Oeillet blanc, 1865), helped toward the stage by the Duc de Morny's influence. Daudet decided to live solely by his pen after the duke's death, and in 1866 the first of his regionalist sketches, or Lettres de mon moulin (Letters from My Mill), based on Provençal folklore began appearing in Paris papers.
Two years later Daudet's first long work, Le Petit chose (The Little Good-for-nothing), was completed; largely autobiographical, this early novel speaks of boyhood joys and travails but in the end leads its hero to the failure and obscurity which Daudet's recent successes were to forestall. The serial publication of his Aventures Prodigieuses de Tartarin de Tarascon (1869) assured Daudet a place in Parisian literary circles, and today—with Lettres and Le Petit chose—it represents his most lasting contribution to French letters. Full of boisterous good humor and the vitality of southern climes, Daudet's picaro Tartarin nevertheless stands in sharp contrast to the young hero of L'Arlésienne, originally one of the Provençal tales related in Lettres, and adapted for the stage as Daudet's most serious dramatic effort in 1872. Here somber passion and jealousy lead to suicide—a thematic shift typical of Daudet's search for personal and artistic maturity in these years. L'Arlésienne failed miserably before the theatergoers of 1872, and this reversal of fortune turned Daudet resolutely back to novel writing. The play remains important, however, for the transformation Daudet there attempted in established theatrical formulas. Augustin Scribe's "well-made play" and the "comedy of manners" fostered by Alexandre Dumas and Émile Augier had for 20 years held dominion over the French stage. The seemingly plotless, moody, sequential arrangement of L'Arlésienne (with incidental music by Georges Bizet) produced shock and laughter, reactions of a prejudiced public erased only by a second, successful production in 1885, when émile Zola's campaign for naturalistic reform in the theater as well as the novel had begun to condition audiences to a genre less dependent on formal contrivance, closer to the unconnected sequences of life.
Daudet felt that the press of family responsibilities made success imperative; the shock of defeat and occupation after the Franco-Prussian War (1870) turned his imagination to a more serious vein, and it was at this time as well that he met regularly with Gustave Flaubert, Ivan Turgenev, Edmond de Goncourt, and Zola—all diversely arguing for an art expressive of nature in all its determinisms, of man in his natural milieu. Zola's formulation of "naturalism, " weighted with scientific analogies, would not come until 1880, but Daudet followed the author of Les Rougon-Macquart as closely as his temperament permitted and over the next 20 years produced 10 long novels of his own (Froment jeune et Risler aîné, 1874; Jack, 1876; Le Nabab, 1877; Les Rois en exil, 1879; Numa Roumestan, 1881; L'évangéliste, 1883; Sapho, 1884; L'Immortel, 1887; La Lutte pour la vie, 1889; Le Soutien de famille, 1896). Perhaps the most accomplished of the early, more determinedly objective works is Jack, the story of an illegimate son reared below his station, forced to become a laborer, and eventually destroyed by the brutalizing world of industrial society. The novel contains one of the first protests heard in France against the dehumanizing effects of child labor.
As in all these realistic novels of manners, however, Daudet undermines both the force of Jack's social protest and the novel's very artistic integrity with lacrimonious appeals to reader sentiment and verbose developments. Sentimentality is perhaps the hallmark of Daudet's fictional world. Daudet died after an apoplectic attack on December 16, 1897.
Alphonse Daudet is remembered chiefly for his regionalist sketches of Provence and for his transitional role in the evolution of 19th-century theater.
Numerous colleges and schools in contemporary France bear his name and his books are still widely read and several are still in print.
( Or, on sait bien peu que si Alphonse Daudet entreprit l...)
(Little What's-His-Name (Le Petit Chose) - Alphonse Daudet...)
(Passionate, calculating, only sometimes honourable but al...)
(Les lettres de mon moulin est un recueil de contes publié...)
(Qui ne connait pas l'illustrissime Tartarin, immortalisé ...)
( Pain, you must be everything for me. Let me find in yo...)
(Tartarin de tarascon)
Daudet was a monarchist and a fervent opponent of the French Republic. Daudet was also anti-Jewish, though less famously so than his son Léon. The main character of Le Nabab was inspired by a Jewish politician who was elected as a deputy for Nîmes. Daudet campaigned against him and lost. Daudet counted many literary figures amongst his friends, including Edouard Drumont, who founded the Antisemitic League of France and founded and edited the anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole. Daudet also exchanged anti-Semitic correspondence with Richard Wagner.
In 1867 Daudet married Julia Allard, author of Impressions de nature et d'art (1879), L'Enfance d'une Parisienne (1883), and some literary studies written under the pseudonym "Karl Steen".
He was a silk manufacturer — a man dogged through life by misfortune and failure.
( 31 May 1837 – 21 August 1921)
