Tears, and also laughter. Daudet with his firm belief in the ultimate victory of all good and pleasant people, and the corresponding punishment of the bad and unkind, enjoyed, like many happy-minded men, a highly developed faculty of pity. It was one of his means of being alive, and this man, who “died of having loved life too well,” neglected none of the exercises that made his nerves tingle and his heart beat. He lived in being sorry for people and things, and he lived in being glad. Another group of his short stories is made up of pure fairy tales that dance before the eyes, their words running and tripping after each other, like a band of elves on midsummer’s eve. They are southern tales of old Provence that he read in the grasshopper’s library under the blue sky, where the librarians sing all day, and there are gossamers for bookmarks. Their heartsome feeling is that of the old song: “Sur le pont d’Avignon Tout le monde danse en rond.” Even when he brings the elves to town, as in _Un Réveillon dans le Marais_, when, into the old courtyard of the mansion that has been turned into a mineral water factory, he introduces cavaliers and ladies of the ancient time, fairies now, being dead so long, he brings with them half a memory of the farandole, and makes them drunk with seltzer. Laughter and tears; it is by these that we remember Daudet. His art is that of wearing his heart on his sleeve. “Here,” he seems to say, “is a sad tale to make you cry (I cried myself in making it), and here is a merry one to make you laugh (my pen quivered with merriment as I wrote it down for you).” Laughter and tears tempted him perhaps too strongly. He was accustomed to tell his stories many times before he wrote them. They shaped themselves, like folktales, in successive recitations, until the inessentials fell away from them and they won economical and immediate effects. The danger of such a manner of composition is a confusion of ends. The only safe audience for a writer is that undiscoverable and absolute judge, who, from his niche in our consciousness, signs now and again his knowledge that such and such an expression is truly expressed, is really expression and not an incomplete and muffling mask. That other audience, whose lips open, whose eyes smile or weep as we read to them, is not a judge of art. Its values are not aesthetic. Its most obvious criticisms are those of laughter and tears, and these are written too clearly not to become more important to us than they should. How can the jocund tale be bad that made you laugh? How can that sad one fail that sent your kerchief to your eyes? There may be imperfections in them; yes, but by removing them, I must be careful not to lose that laughter or those tears. And so, almost inevitably, the tears and laughter come to seem the ends of art instead of its by-products. And they are not the wistful tears that dew the eyelashes before a perfect work, nor the impersonal laughter