


Produced by David Widger





FROMONT AND RISLER

By ALPHONSE DAUDET


With a Preface by LECONTE DE LISLE, of the French Academy




ALPHONSE DAUDET

Nominally Daudet, with the Goncourts and Zola, formed a trio
representing Naturalism in fiction. He adopted the watchwords of that
school, and by private friendship, no less than by a common profession
of faith, was one of them. But the students of the future, while
recognizing an obvious affinity between the other two, may be puzzled to
find Daudet's name conjoined with theirs.

Decidedly, Daudet belonged to the Realistic School. But, above all, he
was an impressionist. All that can be observed--the individual picture,
scene, character--Daudet will render with wonderful accuracy, and all
his novels, especially those written after 1870, show an increasing
firmness of touch, limpidity of style, and wise simplicity in the use of
the sources of pathetic emotion, such as befit the cautious Naturalist.
Daudet wrote stories, but he had to be listened to. Feverish as his
method of writing was--true to his Southern character he took endless
pains to write well, revising every manuscript three times over from
beginning to end. He wrote from the very midst of the human comedy; and
it is from this that he seems at times to have caught the bodily warmth
and the taste of the tears and the very ring of the laughter of men and
women. In the earlier novels, perhaps, the transitions from episode to
episode or from scene to scene are often abrupt, suggesting the manner
of the Goncourts. But to Zola he forms an instructive contrast, of the
same school, but not of the same family. Zola