BOOKS FROM 1900
Alphonse Daudet
Premier Voyage, Premier Mensonage
(1900)
Alphonse Daudet was the author of such nineteenth-century French classics as Le Petit Chose, Lettres de mon moulin and Contes du lundi. Edmund Gosse observed that from the lips of a nearly motionless Daudet, who was afflicted with a fatal illness, "a tide of speech would pour - a flood of colored words."
In 1895, two years before his death, Daudet took his first trip to England. There he visited with Robert Sherard, a great-grandson of William Wordsworth. Anxious to cheer up Sherard, whose friend Oscar Wilde was facing his secont trial, Daudet suggested they collaborate on a book about Daudet's boyhood journey up the Rhone. The result was Premier voyage, premier mensonge, which was published posthumously in 1900. The book came out the following year in London.
After Daudet's death, Willa Cather wrote, "[He] was a gay troubadour from the South, with a lute as sweet as a nightingale's note and a song always dipping from laughter to tears."
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