ABSTRACT

Alphonse Daudet was un homme fatigué who directed his life carefully, day to day. He had suffered from the progressive locomotor ataxia and severe nerve pain of tabes dorsalis – the phase of tertiary syphilis that destroys the dorsal columns of the spinal cord. Nonetheless, as an article in New York Times had reported following the launch, in May, of La Fedor, his latest novel, ‘his genius triumphs over the excruciating nervous rheumatism which has crippled his lower limbs and even the opiates to which he has been obliged to have continuous recourse’. Daudet’s responses and the descriptions of his surroundings are both imagined and factually based. Much of his dialogue is drawn from the random notes, kept 1887–1895, that constitute his memoir, La Doulou, as they have been translated into English by Milton Garver as Suffering, and by Julian Barnes as In the Land of Pain; and from his son Léon Daudet’s Alphonse Daudet: A Memoir.