"... mort de dégoût, de tristesse, et d'absinthe;"--
and he tried to imitate the half cynical, half nostalgic skepticism which had made the author of 'Les Nuits' so powerful over the minds of the new generation and so dear to their hearts.
But it did not seem perfectly genuine. When Daudet said, "My heart is old," no one believed it, and he did not believe it himself, for he entitled the piece 'Fanfaronnade'; and in fact it was nothing more than a fanfaronnade. The book was full of the freshness, buoyancy, and frolicsome petulance of youth. Here and there a few reminiscences might be traced to the earliest poets of the sixteenth century, more particularly to Clement Marot. A tinge of the expiring romanticism lingered in 'Les Amoureuses' with a much more substantial admixture of the spirit of an age which made pleasure-hunting its paramount occupation. The precocious child could modulate the 'Romance à Madame' as well as the page of Beaumarchais, if not better; but he could also laugh it down in Gavroche's sneering way; he could intersperse a song of love with the irony of the boulevard or the more genial humor of his native South. He was at his best in the tale of 'Les Prunes'--
"Si vous voulez savoir comment Nous nous aimâmes pour des prunes"--
That exquisite little piece survived long the youthful volume of 'Les Amoureuses.' In those days, when Coquelin's monologues and _saynètes_ were yet unknown, the brothers Lionnet, then in the height of their vogue, delighted the drawing-rooms with the miniature masterpiece.
Still, those who had prophesied the advent of a new poet were doomed to disappointment. Every one knows what Sainte-Beuve once said about the short-lived existence, in most of us, of a poet whom the real man is to survive. Shall we say that this was the case with Daudet, who never, as far as the world knows, wrote verses after twenty-five? No; the poet was not to die in him, but lived on and lives still to this day. Only he has always written in prose.
After his successful début, Daudet felt his way in different directions. In collaboration with M. Ernest Lepine, who has since made a reputation under the name of Quatrelles, he had a drama, 'The Last Idol' performed at the Odéon theatre,--at that same Odéon which in his first days of Paris seems to have been the centre of his life and of his ambitions. But he more frequently appeared before the public as a journalist and a humorist, a writer of light articles and short stories. Nothing can give a more true, more vivacious, and on the whole more favorable impression of the Daudet of the period than the 'Lettres de Mon Moulin' (Letters from My Windmill). They owe their title to an old deserted windmill where Alphonse Daudet seems to have lived some time in complete seclusion, forgetting, or trying to forget, the excitement of Parisian life. The preface, most curiously disguised under the form of a mock contract which is supposed to transfer the ownership from the old proprietor to the poet, and professes to give the _état de lieux_ or description of the place, is an amusing parody of legal jargon. The next chapter describes the installation of the new master in the same happy vein, with all the odd circumstances attending it.