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The Role of Collaborators in the Career of Alphonse Daudet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Murray Sachs
Murray Sachs*
Affiliation:
Williams College, Williamstown, Mass.
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Extract

The long-standing Daudet-Arène controversy, concerning the authorship of Les lettres de mon moulin, has produced the inevitable quantity of spilled ink since the first public charges in 1883. But as yet the debate has yielded no firm conclusions on the questions at issue. While the statements of both Paul Arène and Alphonse Daudet make it plain that there was some form of collaboration in the writing of those stories, we are still a long way from certainty as to the exact contribution of each. Moreover, the almost total lack of primary documents in the case makes it unlikely that any irrefutable certainty can ever be attained in the matter.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , March 1958 , pp. 116 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958

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References

1 The best concise account of this controversy is in G. V. Dobie, Alphonse Daudet (London, 1949), pp. 283–292. The volume in the Grands événements littéraires series devoted to Les lettres de mon moulin, by Georges Beaume (Paris, 1929), may also be consulted with profit, notably pp. 93–119.

2 See, e.g., Léon Bloy, Belluaires et porchers (Paris, 1905), p. 43.

3 Jacques Vier, “Sur la jeunesse d'Alphonse Daudet,” Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France (April–June 1956), p. 244; Auriant, “Le double visage d'Alphonse Daudet,” Maintenant, No. 8 (1948), p. 73.

4 J.-H. Bornecque, Les années d'apprentissage d'Alphonse Daudet (Paris, 1951), p. 72.

5 Trente ans de Paris, in Œuvres complètes illustrées d'Alphonse Daudet, Edition ne varietur (Paris: Librairie de France, 1929–31), xii, 59–60. Further references to the works of Daudet will be to this edition, designated Œuvres, and incorporated parenthetically in the text.

6 Lucien Daudet, Lettres familiales d'A Iphonse Daudet (Paris, 1944), pp. 17–18. Lucien Daudet erroneously dates this letter 1865, whereas internal evidence proves the correct date to be 1866. For further evidence of the literary collaboration between Timoléon Ambroy and Daudet, see pp. 20–21 and 75–76 in the same collection.

7 Paul Arène, “Pour un fait personnel,” Gil Bias (16 Dec. 1883).

8 See Dobie, p. 291.

9 See, e.g., Ernest Daudet, Mon frère et moi (Paris, 1882), p. 256, or A. Kroff, Alphonse Daudet et la Provence (Paris, 1936), p. 48.

10 Both these anecdotes appear in Henry Céard's valuable essay which served as preface to Daudet's collected works published in 1899. It is now easiest to consult this essay in Œuvres, Vol. i. The reference here is to p. 147.

11 MS letter in theBibliothèqueNationale, FondsFrançais, Nouvelle Acquisition 22459, nos. 135–136.

12 For the record, however, it should be noted that 2 items often included in the Daudet bibliography are actually by Julia Daudet alone: Un an de trouble, the final short story in Lettres à un absent, and Les petits Robinsons des caves, a children's story.

13 There are almost certainly additional letters in the private collections of other members of the Daudet family. Permission to see these other collections was unobtainable.

14 Although Dr. Daudet assured me these details are widely known, I have been unable to confirm them in any written source.

15 It is curious to recall, in connection with Daudet's theatrical career, an article titled “De la collaboration” which Daudet wrote about 1874, as drama critic for Le Journal Officiel, and which is reprinted in Œuvres, xviii, 155–161. In it he points out some of the advantages of collaborating, among which perhaps the most significant was this point: “On évite ainsi le temps perdu, et ces terribles périodes de doute, de découragement, d'écrasement, inséparables de la production solitaire” (p. 155). Nevertheless, he adopts a firm and principled position against collaboration, in the end: “En somme, la collaboration peut être exceptionellement un procédé de travail très utile, fournir des ouvrages remarquables ... mais elle est et sera toujours une infériorité, quand on songe à tout ce que deux esprits doivent perdre d'indépendance et d'accent pour arriver à se confondre sans se heurter ni s'amoindrir” (p. 161). By these words Daudet would of course condemn almost all he himself ever wrote as inferior. But it is always too easy to hang an author with his own words, particularly if he is called to account for this kind of hasty journalism. What is chiefly revealing in this article is its curious ambivalence about collaboration, an ambivalence which is amply reflected in Daudet's own theatrical activities.

16 Hommage à Alphonse Daudet (Paris, 1926), pp. 12–13.

17 See F.-P. Raynal, “Baptiste Bonnet,” Maintenant, No. 5 (1947), pp. 75–86.

18 Cf. Benoit-Guyod, Alphonse Daudet, son temps, son œuvre (Paris, 1947), p. 165.

19 See especially Daudet's preface to Lepelletier's novel, Les morts heureuses, as reproduced in Œuvres, xii, 11–13.

20 Adolphe Brisson, Portraits intimes, 2nd Ser. (Paris, 1904), p. 249, and Edmond de Goncourt, Journal, iii, 198–199.