Alphonse Daudet's Letters from My Windmill - I ought rather to be dispatching rose-coloured poems and basketfuls of love stories

Letters from My Windmill (1869) is a collection of newspaper columns – folk tales, sketches, lazing around – by Alphonse Daudet, an author who for a time, a bit after Windmill was written, was the most popular novelist in France, the “Dickens of France,” a designation I would not take too seriously.

This particular book has become his most prominent in English, and I believe also in French, by chance.  The pieces are mostly about Provence, about “noble peasants living uncomplaining lives of suffering amidst the cicadas and lavender and Mistral and so on, drinking harsh red wine and eating their simple but nutritious peasant fare,”* and how was Daudet to predict Vincent van Gogh and Michelin Guides and the now massive Provencal tourist industry.  Americans romanticize Provence more than the French do, but it is summer cottage land for all of us.

Provence is in France, and therefore wonderful, so my argument against its romanticization is that Normandy, Bordeaux, Roussillon, etc. are also in France and also wonderful.  But  I have barely been in Provence, just in the edge of it, two days in Avignon, which was wonderful, so perhaps someday I will recant much of this.

What role Daudet had in popularizing Provence I do not know, but the love of Provence has helped keep the book alive, much like Washington Irving’s Tales from the Alhambra has remained attached to a visit to Granada.

The book itself is a work of pure charm.  Colleen of Jam & Idleness liked it so much she vowed to read all of Daudet’s books.  It is a happy, sentimental book.

After all, why should I be sad?  I live a thousand leagues from Paris, on a sun-soaked hill, in the country of tambourines and muscat wine.  Around me all is sunshine and music…  I ought rather to be dispatching rose-coloured poems and basketfuls of love stories.  (Ch. 15)

The little joke here is that the stories generally end in suicide, revenge, shipwreck, or, in one memorable case, mortal combat with a wolf.  The sentimentality is that of Dickens or Hugo.

The style is more of a blend of Flaubert and Hugo.  Daudet catches some nice effects.  Here is a priest racing through a Mass:

Like hurrying wine-harvesters treading the grapes, both splatter about in the latin of the Mass, sending splashes in all directions.  (Ch. 17)

Here Daudet has shifted to Algeria to see a snowfall:

In this so pure, so rare air of Algeria, the snow seemed like dust of mother-of-pearl.  It had the sheen of white peacock feathers.  (Ch. 18)

That last piece, “The Oranges,” begins in Paris, where “oranges have a sad look.”  In the winter they are sold from handcarts, so that “thousands of oranges [are]scattered about the streets, the peel lying in the mud of the gutters, making you think of some gigantic Christmas tree shaking its branches laden with artificial fruit all over Paris.”  If you are writing a historical novel set in 19th century Paris, you would be crazy not to steal this.  With a step or two, memories about oranges take Daudet to a Campo Santo in Corsica, where he watches, in between naps, an old man tend the cemetery:

Yet, without his being aware of it, this good man worked with a kind of reverence, softening all noises and gently closing the door of the vault each time, as if he feared to waken someone.  In the great, radiant silence, his care for that little garden disturbed not one bird, and it had nothing of sadness about it.  It only made the sea seem more immense, the sky more high; and this siesta without end, amid the ever-restless, ever-triumphant life-forces of nature, diffused all around it the feeling of eternal rest.

Two truffled turkeys, the skin “stretched so tightly you would have thought it was going to burst as it was roasting,” appear at the beginning of Chapter 17.  I read an old Penguin Classics edition, tr. Frederick Davies.

*  I am quoting myself, something I wrote before I had actually read the book.  I was not quite right, but I was close.

Puzzling over Prosper Mérimée

The puzzle about Prosper Mérimée (1803-70) is why he's not read more, outside of France. He wrote Carmen (1845), the source of the opera, which keeps his name around, but I don't know how often that translates into readers. Oxford World’s Classics has kept an edition of his stories in print, so someone is reading it. More people should. Here’s the beginning and ending of the first paragraph of Carmen:

"I had always suspected that the geographers were talking nonsense when they located the site of the Battle of Munda in the territory of the Bastuli-Poeni, near present-day Monda, about two leagues north of Marbella... While waiting for my dissertation to resolve once and for all the geographical problem which is holding all learned Europe in suspense, I want to tell you a little story. It in no way prejudges the fascinating question of the site of the battle of Munda."

The narrator follows this pedantry with a story of love, madness, sex, brutal murders, Gypsies and bandits. So it turns out that Mérimée is funny. I don’t think any of the classical geography made it into Bizet’s Carmen.

Mérimée specialized in the exotic – Gypsies, slave ship revolts, Corsica, Lithuania. Sometimes his stories have supernatural elements, and sometimes just wild people. The two Corsican tales, the novella Colomba (1840) and the tiny “Mateo Falcone” (1829) are both horrible tales of revenge. Walter Pater called “Mateo Falcone” “perhaps the cruelest story in the world.” Pater was a sort of human orchid, so not a trustworthy source, but in this case he is only wrong because he apparently was not aware of certain stories of Heinrich von Kleist. Colomba, though, is completely different. Maybe a sketch is in order.

The Nevils, father and daughter are bored by Rome. The hunting is bad, and the daughter can’t find anything that all of her friends haven’t already seen and sketched.* They by chance make their way to Corsica, which promises exotic hunting and sketching, and the excitement promised by the dashing Lieutenant della Rebbia. It looks like this will be the story of outsiders confronting Romantic Coriscan culture. But there's a bit of a trick – della Rebbia, returning from the Napoleonic Wars, is actually the outsider now. The core of the book is his struggle with his sister Colomba over how to revenge his father’s death.

This story has everything. Shootouts, revenge, romance, a final shocker. It's been filmed many times in France and Italy, as early as 1918, as late as 2005. A puzzle why it's not better known in English.

* "At the Hôtel Beauveau Miss Lydia had a bitter disappointment. She had brought back with her a pretty sketch of the Pelasgic or Cyclopean gate at Segni, which she believed the artists had overlooked. However, on meeting her in Marseilles, Lady Frances Fenwich showed Lydia her album, in which, bewteen a sonnet and a dried flower, the gate in question was to be found, embellished with lavish applications of burnt sienna. Miss Lydia gave the gate at Segni to her chambermaid, and quite lost her esteem for Pelasgic edifices."