He is not only incapable of the girding enmity which Taine detected and detested in Thackeray's treatment of Becky Sharp, but he is also devoid of the callous detachment with which Flaubert dissected Emma Bovary under the microscope. Daudet is never flagrantly hostile toward one of his creatures; and, however contemptible or despicable the characters he has called into being, he is scrupulously fair to them. Sidonie and Felicia Ruys severally throw themselves away, but Daudet is never intolerant. He is inexorable, but he is not insulting. I cannot but think that it is Provence whence Daudet derived the precious birthright of sympathy, and that it is Provence again which bestowed on him the rarer gift of sentiment. It is by his possession of sympathy and of sentiment that he has escaped the aridity which suffocates us in the works of so many other Parisian novelists. The South endowed him with warmth and heartiness and vivacity; and what he learnt from Paris was the power of self-restraint and the duty of finish. He was born in Provence and he died in Paris; he began as a poet and he ended as a veritist; and in each case there was logical evolution and not contradiction. The Parisian did not cease to be a Provencal; and the novelist was a lyrist still. Poet though he was, he had an intense liking for the actual, the visible, the tangible. He so hungered after truth that he was ready sometimes to stay his stomach with facts in its stead,--mere fact being but the outward husk, whereas truth is the rich kernel concealed within. His son tells us that Daudet might have taken as a motto the title of Goethe's autobiography, "Dichtung und Wahrheit,"--Poetry and Truth. And this it is that has set Daudet apart and that has caused his vogue with readers of all sorts and conditions,--this unique combination of imagination and verity. "His originality," M. Jules Lemaitre has acutely remarked, "is closely to unite observation and fantasy, to extract from the truth all that it contains of the improbable and the surprising, to satisfy at the same time the readers of M. Cherbuliez and the readers of M. Zola, to write novels which are at the same time realistic and romantic, and which seem romantic only because they are very sincerely and very profoundly realistic." II.