Alphonse Daudet

From an impoverished family in Nîmes, Daudet worked as an unhappy school usher in Alès, immortalized in his autobiographical novel Le Petit Chose (1868). Moving to Paris, he became an intimate friend of Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, and Edmond de Goncourt.

In Lettres de mon moulin (1869), written from an old windmill in Fontvieille, he enchanted readers with 'La Chèvre de Monsieur Seguin' and 'L'Arlésienne' (set to music by Georges Bizet). Despite decades of agony from spinal tabes dorsalis documented in La Doulou, he maintained luminous humanity.