My France was built of books. And that year the book was Alphonse Daudet's Letters from My Windmill, the Penguin Classics edition with the farm cart from Van Gogh's Harvest at La Crau on its cover, and inside Edward Ardizzone's illustrations tempering Daudet's often harsh entries. Daudet wrote a couple of dozen short chapters, some published while he was working as a hack at Le Figaro, the rest when the book came out in 1869. The translator of the Penguin edition, Frederick Davies, admits in his introduction that Daudet is not entirely to be trusted; that his return to his native Provence and his rental there of a windmill in which to write these despatches, that even his affection for the farm dogs, were not quite as reported. (Dogs scared Daudet, he had fled Provençal poverty, and though "his" windmill stands to this day enticing pilgrims he wrote most of the pieces on a short commute from Paris.)
I didn't care. A comic few of his faux-folk stories (Father Gaucher's Elixir, The Three Low Masses – tales Marcel Pagnol unsurprisingly filmed in the 1950s) clomp and gurn too hard even for those of us brought up to sing Widecombe Fair fortissimo. Others, say Bixiou's Wallet, are close to a Dickens Christmas story, although with a real almond bitterness to their marzipan. There are impressive tragedies at a scant 1,500 words, like the backstories to single paragraphs in an old newspaper: the inn depressed to ruin by deaths in the family, the farm boy obsessed by a flirt from Arles farandoling in her velvet and lace. Daudet based a melodrama on her with music by Bizet, but the stage version expands to lassitude. His sense of place was strongest when pent up in his fragments. [Aqui]
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