"double" of Daudet's attached itself to some obscure existence, following it up and down, penetrating its joys and sorrows, abstracting its secret. Like George Eliot, like Dickens, he delighted in being the historian of the humble.

He has told us elsewhere the history of Little What's-His-Name. Quite another story that of his young companion, told to him in the forest of Sénart, afterwards retold to the world as Daudet alone could tell it-the story of Jack.

His real name we do not know, for he had none - this is the story of little No-name, the mere flyblow of chance, born of a father whose name even was not known of a mother known only too well, an origin clouded with doubt and shame.

The jealous caprice of a lover of this woman had sentenced him to a life of physical labor for which he was unfitted; he had broken down under the strain, and, when Daudet first met him, had been sent to the country to rest for a while, and regain health. Even there he was pursued by thoughts of his mother, and when his exile grew unendurable, he would set out afoot, and walk the six leagues that separated him from her, for he adored this mother.

A portion of his childhood had been spent in a wealthy pensionnat at Auteuil, and that early education, though it had not lasted long, had left an influence upon his character, and had given him tastes out of keeping with the squalid surroundings of his life. He loved to read, and as the doctor

had forbidden all manual labor he spent long days devouring Daudet's books, keeping him silent company while he worked. Looking out upon the green fields, the peaceful river, he would say: "I can understand better when I am here."

Instinctively he appropriated the best books had to give him, making it his own. Daudet led him to talk of them, of his past, and of the factory life he had led. Certain incidents of factory life at Indret described later in Jack are merely the souvenirs of those apprentice days.

Chance, which had brought the two together, soon separated them, the writer returning to Paris, "Jack" finding work upon the Lyons railroad. Daudet saw him only at rare intervals, and each time he appeared thinner, weaker, more despairing, crushed beneath the hopelessness of his struggle, wearied with a task that left every higher faculty unemployed. Yet he would not leave his work, fearing to pain and disappoint his mother, and no one, himself least of all, realized how critical his condition really was.

So months passed. One day, Daudet tells us, there arrived a little note, pathetic in its brevity, written in a tremulous hand: "Sick at La Charité, Salle de Saint Jean de Dieu." There the writer found him, lying upon a stretcher, there being no bed for him. As much, perhaps, to divert him from his own suffering and wretchedness as for any other reason, Daudet asks him to write his impressions of the life about him. A little later

these articles were published; picture the joy of little No-name upon receiving the few louis his work brought him, the first money he had earned with his pen!

He left the hospital, but not fully recovered. Recalling how much he himself had been benefited by an utter change of scene and climate, Daudet wrote to Algiers, and obtained for his protégé a minor position to which very slight duties and a salary of fifteen hundred francs were attached. Filled with gratitude and joy, eagerly planning the writing of new articles, the boy took leave of Daudet and his wife, never to meet them again.

In Algiers a friend of Daudet's opened his doors wide to the young exile. His health did not mend rapidly, but the freedom of his new life was a joy and inspiration. Writing to Daudet at this time of all he felt, he says, naïvely: "It seems to me as if I were in Heaven!"

Then came the Days of the Siege, filled with events of such sad and ever-memorable significance. Daudet was not the mere passive spectator of these events. He had almost forgotten his young charge, when a letter from Jack's physician brought a painful reminder of his protégé's existence. "Jack" was very ill, the letter stated, and begged for some news of his mother.

To the mother also an appeal was sent, but no reply.

"Jack" died in the hospital at Algiers after a

long and agonizing illness. He had refused to allow Daudet's friend to care for him in the latter's home, fearing to become a burden, and realizing that this was indeed his last illness. At the last, speaking to this friend of Daudet, he said: "Tell him now that I am leaving life, I regret most of all to leave him and his dear wife."

Such, in brief, are the meagre details of the life of the real Jack, as narrated by Daudet himself, who knew him best. A single paragraph of a daily newspaper might almost tell the story which later Daudet chose to amplify, modifying the circumstances but slightly in writing the longest work that has come from his pen. That life in itself seems scarcely more than a little obscure page, blotted and half obliterated by human tears, merely a stray leaflet, detached from the great Book of human history. For a time it must have seemed to Daudet merely that- something too personal, too painful to talk about or write about.

But one day he finds himself telling this story to a friend, Gustave Droz. Perhaps something in the simplicity, the sincerity with which the bare details were told, may have touched the friend, for he suggested that Daudet tell to the world the story of Jack.

Did Daudet really need this suggestion? Had not Jack's story been shaping itself unconsciously in his brain from that day when he first met him? Had not his "double" been taking notes from the very moment of their meeting? Though imagina.

tion plays so large a part in his work, he first lived the events that later took literary shape in his brain.

It is characteristic of Daudet that he suddenly becomes so possessed with the idea of Jack, that to follow the latter's fortunes he flings aside the work at which he had been so busily engaged. And what is the book he lays aside, with fine disregard of consequences? The most brilliant perhaps of all his novels - the Parisian's Vanity Fair - The Nabob! Even De Mora's portrait must wait while he plunges headlong, heart and soul, into the story of Jack!

What is the quality of qualities obvious even to the most superficial reader of Jack? Note the remorseless subtlety of perception, the ironic delicacy of touch with which De Mora's portrait is painted, neither sparing nor extenuating-that "double" of Daudet's taking notes even in the chamber which Death has entered before him.

Contrast such portrayal of character with the story of Jack. The latter is a labor of love. Daudet really loves this Jack whose history he tells, and cannot permit his reader to lose sight of the fact even for a moment. When he presents to you Ida's Jack (with a K,) dressed grotesquely à l'anglaise, bare-legged and shivering, his lank limbs betraying all the awkwardness of growing youth in revolt, he refers to the boy in terms of endearment. He wishes that every one should love as he loves "ce cher petit." Daudet the loving and the lovable