TARTARIN DE TARASCON. Roman & PORT-TARASCON. DERNIERES AVENTURES DE L'ILLUSTRE TARTARIN

Paris: Ernest Flammarion, nd. Early Printings. Illustrated with the original wrappers and called for engravings. Tall 8vo, bound in early green cloth, the covers decorated with the original wrappers to the first of the two books, the second set of covers is bound in. 74, [2]; 70, [2, ads] pp. A good copy, well bound, tight and very usuable. As usual, the paper has mellowed down due to the quality of the material. EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF THESE ICONIC WORKS BY French short-story writer and novelist Alphonse Daudet who is remembered especially for his tales of provincial life in the south of France. Psychologically, Daudet represents a synthesis of conflicting elements, and his actual experience of life at every social level and in the course of travels helped to develop his natural gifts. A true man of the south of France, he combined an understanding of passion with a view of the world illuminated by Mediterranean sunlight and allowed himself unfettered flights of the imagination without ever relaxing his attention to the detail of human behaviour.
Daudet’s work as a whole reveals not so much a continuous evolution as an episodic process in which various literary tendencies found expression successively. Even so, the antir-omantic irony of Tartarin de Tarascon gave place to a realism akin to that of the Pointillist and Impressionist painters. (Brit)