“The entire work of Balzac pulsates with a fever of discovery and of impromptu.” It was Alphonse Daudet, the little David of the south, with “the head of an Arabian Christ,” who wrote that sentence, a sentence that might be aptly fitted to his own case. Daudet loved Balzac, loved Beethoven, and—this may be a surprise for some—loved Wagner, knew Wagner. Why not? Style for him was a question of intensity, and what is Wagner if not intense? And Daudet was no mean critic. He could recognize the unchanging _moi_ of Hugo, and the miraculous gift of transforming himself that gave to Balzac the power of multitudinous creation. He could speak of Georges Rodenbach as “the most exquisite and refined of poets and prose writers, moist and dripping with his Flemish fogs, a writer whose sentence has the tender effect of belfries against the sky and the soft golden hue of reliquaries and stained glass windows.” Friedrich Nietzsche was “that admirable writer with a surprising power for destruction”; while in Ibsen’s Wild Duck he found “the india-rubber laugh, the laugh of Voltaire congealed by Pomeranian sleet.” The reading of Dostoïevsky’s Crime and Punishment was a “crisis of his mind”; and for Tolstoy he always entertained a warm admiration. After Turgénieff died some alleged souvenirs of his were published and gave Daudet exquisite unhappiness, for he had loved the man and extolled the artist. M. Halperine-Kaminsky cleared up the mystery by proving that Turgénieff had never written the offensive paragraphs. They were really not of serious import, consisting of several free criticisms about the realistic group to which Daudet belonged. As I remember, Turgénieff is reported to have said that much of the work of Daudet, the de Goncourts, Zola, and a few others smelt of the lamp. Yet this simple phrase caused Daudet pain, for he prided himself on his spontaneity of style, his freedom from use of the file. Possibly, Turgénieff—and this is pure conjecture on my part—knew of Daudet’s opinions touching upon what he called “Russian pity, which is limited to criminals and low women.” He named it a “sentimental monstrosity,” and for that reason depreciated the “rousing fanaticism and actual hallucinations of the Russian Dickens”—Dostoïevsky.