Alphonse Daudet

Born to a silk manufacturer in Nîmes, France, Alphonse Daudet didn’t have the smoothest of starts. When Daudet was seventeen, his father lost all of his money, leaving Daudet without any easy educational or employment prospects. Daudet moved to Paris, where he joined his elder brother, to pursue writing, and published his first book of poems, Les Amoureuses, in 1858. During his early years in Paris, he was recruited to act as undersecretary to the Duke de Morny, a powerful minister under Napoleon III. When the Franco-Prussian war began in 1870, Daudet enlisted in the army. He continued writing throughout this time, publishing books such as Letters from My Mill (1869) and The Nabob (1877), as well plays, including The Last Idol (1862). His novel Fromont the Younger and Risler the Elder (1874) won an award from the French Academy, and as a result Daudet became an established fixture in the Paris literary scene. He would not live long, however. The symptoms of a venereal disease that he had picked up as a young man escalated with age, leading to an affliction of the spinal cord. He died in 1897, at the age of 57.