Fromont and Risler, Volume I (Esprios Classics): Preface by LECONTE DE LISLE,

Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) was a French novelist. He was the father of Léon Daudet and Lucien Daudet. Alphonse took to writing, and his poems were collected into a small volume, Les Amoureuses (1858). He obtained employment on Le Figaro, then under Cartier de Villemessant's energetic editorship, wrote two or three plays, and began to be recognized, among those interested in literature, as possessing distinction and promise. In 1866, Daudet's Lettres de Mon Moulin, written in Clamart, near Paris, and alluding to a windmill in Fontvieille, Provence, won the attention of many readers. The first of his longer books, Le Petit Chose (1868), did not, however, produce popular sensation. It is, in the main, the story of his own earlier years told with much grace and pathos.