devotees of Lady Nicotine will be interested to learn that in answer to a question he once said, “I have smoked a great deal while working, and the more I smoked the better I worked. I have never noticed that tobacco is injurious, but I must admit that, when I am not well, even the smell of a cigarette is odious.” He added that he had a great horror of alcohol as a stimulant for work, and has ofttimes been heard to say that those who believe in working on spirits had better make up their minds to become total abstainers if they hope to achieve anything in the way of literature.

Unlike most literary ménages, M. and Madame Daudet are one of those happy couples who are said by cynics to be the exceptions which prove the rule. Literary men are proverbially unlucky in their helpmates; and geniuses have been proved again and again to reserve their fitful humours and uncertain tempers for home use. M. and Madame Daudet are at once sympathetic, literary partners, and the happiest of married couples; in L’Enfance d’une Parisienne, Enfants et Mères, and Fragments d’un Livre Inédit, Madame Daudet has proved that she is in her own way as original and delicate an artist as her husband. She has never written a novel, but, as a great French critic once aptly remarked, “Each one of her books contains the essence of innumerable novels.” Her literary work has been an afterthought, an accident; she is not anxious to make a name by her writing, and her most intimate friends have never heard her mention her literary faculty; like most Frenchwomen, a devoted mother, when not helping her husband, she is absorbed in her children, and whilst her boys were at the Lycée she taught herself Latin in order to help them prepare their lessons every evening; and she is now her young daughter’s closest companion and friend.

One of the most charming characteristics of Alphonse Daudet is his love for, and pride in, his wife. “I often think of my first meeting with her,” he will say. “I was quite a young fellow, and had a great prejudice against literary women, and especially against poetesses, but I came, saw, and was conquered, and,” he will conclude smiling, “I have remained under the charm ever since.... People sometimes ask me whether I approve of women writing; how should I not, when my own wife has always written, and when all that is best in my literary work is owing to her influence and suggestion. There are whole realms of human nature which we men cannot explore. We have not eyes to see, nor hearts to understand, certain subtle things which a woman perceives at once; yes, women have a mission to fulfil in the literature of to-day.”

the provençal furniture.

Strangely enough, M. Daudet made the acquaintance of his future wife through a favourable review he wrote of a volume of verse published by her parents, M. and Madame Allard. They were so pleased with the notice that they wrote and asked the critic to come and see them. How truly thankful the one time critic must now feel that he was inspired to deal gently by the little bouquin.

Madame Daudet is devoted to art, and her pretty salon is one of the most artistic intérieurs in Paris, whilst the dining-room, fitted up with old Provençal furniture, looks as though it had been lifted bodily out of some fastness in troubadour land.

The tie between the novelist and his children is a very close one; he has said of Léon that there stands his best work; and, indeed, the young man is in a fair way to make his father’s words come true, for, inheriting much of both parents’ literary faculty, M. Léon Daudet lately made his débût as a novelist with Hœrès, a remarkable story with a purpose, in which the author strove to explain his somewhat curious theories on the laws of heredity. Having originally been intended for the medical profession, he takes a special interest in this subject. It is curious that three such distinct and different literary gifts should exist simultaneously in the same family.

As soon as even the cool, narrow streets of the Quartier Latin begin to grow dusty and sultry with summer heat, the whole Daudet family emigrate to the novelist’s charming country cottage at Champrosay. There old friends, such as M. Edmond de Goncourt, are ever made welcome, and life is one long holiday for those who bring no work with them. Daudet himself has described his country home as being “situated thirty miles from Paris, at a lovely bend of the Seine, a provincial Seine invaded by bulrushes, purple irises, and water-lilies, bearing on its bosom tufts of grass, and clumps of tangled roots, on which the tired dragon-flies alight, and allow themselves to be lazily floated down the stream.”

the drawing room.

It was in a round, ivy-clad pavilion overhanging the river that le maître du logis wrote L’Immortel. On an exceptionally fine day he would get into a canoe, and let it drift among the reeds, till, in the shadow of an old willow-tree, the boat became his study, and the two crossed oars his desk. Strange that so bitter and profoundly cynical a study of modern Paris life should have been evolved in such surroundings, whilst the Contes de Mon Moulin, and many other of his most ideal nouvelles, were written in the sombre grey house where M. and Madame Daudet lived during many years of their early married life.

The author of Les Rois en Exile has not yet utilised Champrosay as a background to any of his stories; he takes notes, however, of all that goes on in the little village community, much as he did in the Duc de Morny’s splendid palace, and in time his readers may have the pleasure of perusing an idyllic yet realistic picture of French country life, an outcome of his summer experiences.

Alphonse Daudet was born just fifty-three years ago in the sunlit, white bâtisse at Nimes, which he has described in the painful, melancholy history of his childhood, entitled Le Petit Chose. At an age when other French boys are themselves lycéans, he became usher in a kind of provincial Dotheboys Hall; and some idea of what the sensitive, poetical lad went through may be gained by the fact that he more than once seriously contemplated committing suicide. But fate had something better in store for le petit Daudet, and his seventeenth birthday found him in Paris sharing his brother Ernest’s garret, having arrived in the great city with just forty sous remaining of his little store, after spending two days and nights in a third-class carriage.

Even now, there is a touch of protection and maternal affection in the way in which Ernest Daudet regards his younger brother, and the latter never mentions his early struggles without recalling the self-abnegation, generous kindliness, and devotion of “mon frère.” The two went through some hard times together. “Ah!” says the great writer, speaking of those days, “I thought my brother passing rich, for he earned seventy-five francs a month by being secretary to an old gentleman at whose dictation he took down his memoirs.” And so they managed to live, going occasionally to the theatre, and seeing not a little of life, on the sum of thirty shillings a month apiece!

When receiving visitors, the author of Tartarin places himself with his back to the light on one of the deep, comfortable couches