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

betrays himself in every page that chronicles the life of his hero. These interpolations are so much a part of the narrative that they hardly interrupt it, though they do not aid it. He does not, like one of his English brothers, interpolate a page of dissertation upon the vanity of human life, nor, like another of our English novelists, pause in the narrative to preach a sermon. It is never as preacher or moralist that Daudet peers over your shoulder. But the quality that reveals itself in his work is none the less a purely personal one; he loves this humble being, whose biographer he is, so intensely that he must identify himself with each mood of the boy. He follows him everywhere, penetrating every experience of Jack's, every phase of feeling, with that subtle clairvoyance which makes the very soul of things transparent to him at times. He identifies himself with the life of childhood, all its miracle and mystery; no real or imaginary terror that exists in a child's mind but Daudet seeks to fathom it. A child's homesickness and loneliness and dread of the darkness its fancy peoples with vague shapes, how real they are! That journey by night from Paris to Etiolles, is it Jack's or his own? Hard to say, so completely Daudet merges his own personality in that of the child. This personal quality, often accompanied by an almost feminine sensibility, is a dangerous gift, but here it produced pictures most vivid and real.

Daudet's theories were widely at variance

with those of the writer to whom he dedicated Jack; the doctrine of "impersonality" had no charm for him, was foreign to his temperament, and he wisely realized this. Yet, however he differed from his friends in theory, his own method of work led him to be as ardent a realist as any one of these. But what realism! Realism that has filtered through the imagination, leaving the dregs behind so that the bright, limpid resultant is a far different thing from the realism of Zola — not of the earth earthy - rather, a jewel darting lambent fires, the very crystallization of Daudet's thought and feeling.

With painful persistence he follows Jack to the final scene of his martyrdom, the slave of a sort of obsession that will not permit him to rest so long as there remains the least small island of Jack's personality unexplored. His life in the forge, aboard the "Cydnus," in the Eyssendeck factory, his degradation and effacement, the final enfranchisement and new birth of his soul, Daudet's "double" has seen it all, and is not less assiduous than Zola himself in his pilgrimages to every remote nook that may throw light upon the subject, yet his narrative never becomes the mere itinerary of scenes and events.

"Un livre de pitié, de colère, et d'ironie," says Daudet of Jack in this dedication to Gustave Flaubert, and that Flaubert found somewhat too much of these qualities in Jack is gathered from his laconic criticism, hardly the words of one who