_Le Petit Chose_ is the story of his childhood. It is the tale of a little boy whose father is an unsuccessful man of business, a little boy with a parrot and a dream of Robinson Crusoe, who is transplanted from his south to a northern manufacturing town, a child who becomes an usher in a school where his youth and his poverty make him butt of boys and masters alike, where he writes love-letters for a gymnastic instructor, and suffers in his stead for their success, a child who goes to Paris at seventeen to join his brother in poverty and hope, and to write a poem about blue butterflies. The book is almost true to history, except that, unlike Daudet, _le Petit Chose_ ends as partner in a china shop, regretfully resigning his blue butterflies to marry the daughter of the china shop’s proprietor. The real tale of his shyness and pathetic adventures, that Daudet was never tired of telling, since it was his own, goes on in other books. There is in them all a _joie d’écrire_ as much as _joie de vivre_. He rejoices in every misfortune of his childhood, because, in describing it, he finds an opportunity for life as a young man. His life as a child had been told to himself as a fairy tale. He had told ingenious lies to excuse his truant days on the river, killing off a Pope to hide, in his family’s excitement, his lateness for a meal. He told lies to himself to excuse the sordid appearances of his existence, and now he had a chance of telling lies again, and so living another romance. Daudet’s writing was always a means of living for him. His own life could be multiplied indefinitely by the glosses he put upon it. He is not, like Coppée, a disillusioned man remembering dreams, paining himself with the memory of the boy he was. Daudet, far from envying that boy of whom he writes, seems to be still identical with him, and tells his escapades as if they were yesterday’s, as indeed they might be. Even when he tries to write disillusioned novels, he sits in a rosy cloud, and is irrepressibly happy in spite of them. He never knows whether pain or pleasure is the more enjoyable. Either is an aid to living, and perhaps the former gives life a keener taste.