Men of this kind do not spend their vitality altogether for nothing. More than others they need affection and applause. A face of disapproval in their audience is enough to wither their wings, and they ask for goodwill, if only to help them to continue the performance. _Le Petit Chose_, like most of Daudet’s work, like his life, and his other representations of his life, conversational or on paper, is an appeal to be loved. He asks to be seen as he sees himself, and asks very successfully. It is this, I think, that makes it easy to forgive him his sins against pure art; this that accounts for his friends’ love of him, and also for the popular success that made him feel a little uncomfortable among them. His greed of affection made him not very fastidious; he was glad to be loved by his baker as well as by Edmond de Goncourt. Daudet acquired the habit of being lovable. He made his own life into a fairy tale, and, since it was the surest way to gratitude, soon found it difficult to see the lives of others in any different way. He copied his men and women from nature, as he said, but each one of them readily became _le Petit Chose_, and he his affectionate, rose-spectacled biographer. When his novels are laid aside, and we look at their backs, we forget their extraordinary observation, and see characters exaggerated by a man who is anxious to persuade; and when these characters have faded away into framed drawings like those taken from back numbers of _Punch_, we remember little of the books but a spirit that asks love and gives it, is ready to understand more than there is to be understood, and to make excuses for those who are without them. We think of Daudet as the tenderest possible biographer for ourselves, and at the same time feel a little shrinking from the idea of being exhibited with such emphasis. Some of the novels, with which we are not here particularly concerned, do their best to dispel the atmosphere of rose-leaves and sunshine, involving us in a swift and keen analysis of unkind and unpleasant motives. But when we close even these, little is left of them but their author’s charm, and the memory of those incidents or descriptions, in which, freed from the burden of an ambitious task, he loosens the bridle of his romancing vitality.