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Translation, introduction and notes copyright © Julian Barnes 2002
Julian Barnes has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 2002
This edition reissued by Vintage in 2018
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Daudet and his wife Julia at Champrosay, c. 1892.
Alphonse Daudet was born in Nimes in 1840. He made his name with gentle stories and novels portraying life in the French provinces, notably Lettres de mon Moulin (1869). He died in 1897. His extraordinary notebooks detailing the effects of syphilis on his life were first published under the title In the Land of Pain by Daudet’s widow in 1931.
Julian Barnes is the author of twelve novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. He has also written three books of short stories, Cross Channel, The Lemon Table and Pulse; four collections of essays; and two books of non-fiction, Nothing to be Frightened Of and the Sunday Times Number One bestseller Levels of Life. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d’honneur.
julianbarnes.com
IN 1883 TURGENEV had an operation in Paris for the removal of a neuroma in the lower abdomen. The doctors gave him ether rather than chloroform, and he was conscious throughout the intervention. Afterwards, he was visited by his friend Alphonse Daudet, with whom he had often dined in the company of Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, Zola and others. ‘During the operation,’ Turgenev told him, ‘I thought about our dinners and tried to find the right words to convey exactly the sense of the steel slicing through my skin and entering my body … It was like a knife cutting into a banana.’ Goncourt, recording this anecdote, commented, ‘Our old friend Turgenev is a true man of letters.’
How is it best to write about illness, and dying, and death? Despite Turgenev’s impeccable example, pain is normally the enemy of the descriptive powers. When it became his turn to suffer, Daudet discovered that pain, like passion, drives out language. Words come ‘only when everything is over, when things have calmed down. They refer only to memory, and are either powerless or untruthful.’ The prospect of dying may, or may not, concentrate the mind and encourage a final truthfulness; may or may not include the useful aide-mémoire of your life passing before your eyes; but it is unlikely to make you a better writer. Modest or jaunty, wise or vainglorious, literary or journalistic, you will write no better, no worse. And your literary temperament may, or may not, prove suited to this new thematic challenge. When Harold Brodkey’s heroic – and, it seemed, heroically self-deceiving – account of his own dying was published in the New Yorker, I congratulated the magazine’s editor for ‘leaving it all in’, by which I meant the evidence of Brodkey’s impressive egomania. ‘You should have seen what we took out,’ she replied wryly.
Alphonse Daudet (1840–97) is a substantially forgotten writer nowadays. Novelist, playwright, journalist, he is viewed as a sunny humorist and clear stylist, creator in Lettres de mon moulin and Tartarin de Tarascon of an agreeable if partial Provence. He is offered to students of French as a nursery slope or climbing wall: practise on this. But in his day he was not only highly successful (and very rich); he also ate at the top literary table. Dickens called him ‘my little brother in France’; Henry James, who translated Daudet’s novel Port-Tarascon, called him ‘a great little novelist’; Goncourt ‘mon petit Daudet’. As may be deduced, he was short of stature. He was also kind, generous and sociable, a passionate observer and an unstoppable talker. These qualities transfer into his fiction. He was, in various descriptions (all of them from Henry James), ‘the happiest novelist of his day’, ‘beyond comparison the most charming story-teller of the day’, ‘an observer not perhaps of the deepest things of life, but of the whole realm of the immediate, the expressive, the actual’. As these assessments, laudatory yet limiting, imply, Daudet was the sort of writer – hard-working, honourable, popular – whose fame and relevance are largely used up in his own lifetime. The twenty-volume collected edition of 1929–32 seemed to have said (more than) it all. In Anglo-Saxon countries the surname Daudet nowadays refers as often to Alphonse’s elder son Léon, the highly gifted polemicist who followed an intransigent path to ultra-nationalism, royalism and anti-semitism; who was co-founder, with Charles Maurras, of L’Action française.
If Daudet dined in the highest company, he was also a member of a less enviable nineteenth-century French club: that of literary syphilitics. Here again, he is somewhat overshadowed: the Big Three were Baudelaire, Flaubert and Maupassant. Daudet probably ranks fourth equal with Jules de Goncourt, Edmond’s younger brother. He could at least claim that the syphilis he acquired, shortly after his arrival in Paris at the age of seventeen, came from a classier, indeed more literary, source than theirs. He caught it from a lectrice de la cour, a woman employed to read aloud at the Imperial court. She was, he assured Goncourt, a lady ‘from the top drawer’.
After its initial declaration, and treatment with mercury, the disease lay dormant; Daudet worked, published, became famous, married (in 1867), had three children. He also continued an active, carefree, careless sex life. From the time he lost his virginity at the age of twelve, he had always been ‘a real villain’ in matters of sex, he once confessed; he slept with many of his friends’ mistresses; about ten times a year he felt the need for the sort of ‘ordure’ he could not ask his wife to permit. Drink for him led inevitably to debauchery (and contrition, and forgiveness); but then so did many other things. In 1884 he had an operation for a hydrocele. Having a grossly swollen testicle painfully drained (and then drained again when the first operation didn’t work) would probably make most men sleep in their trousers for weeks; Daudet’s reaction was to go straight out in search of sex. In 1889 he reported to Edmond de Goncourt a dream in which he was caught up in the Last Judgement and defending himself against a sentence of 3,500 years in hell for ‘the crime of sensuality’.
When his syphilis reached the tertiary stage, it initially reasserted itself as ‘rheumatism’, severe fatigue and haemorrhages. By the early 1880s, however, it became increasingly clear that Daudet was suffering from the form of neurosyphilis known as tabes dorsalis: literally, wasting of the back. Its chief manifestations in his case were locomotor ataxia (the progressive inability to control one’s movements) and, eventually, paralysis. In 1885 J-M Charcot, the greatest neurologist of the day, declared him ‘lost’; Daudet was to live another twelve years, in increasing pain and debility, after hearing this death sentence. He saw the finest specialists, who sent him to the finest thermal establishments, where he took the waters and mud-baths. He tried all the latest treatments, no matter how violent and outlandish. Charcot recommended the Seyre suspension, in which the patient was hung up, some of the time by the jaw alone, for several minutes. It caused excruciating pain and did little good. David Gruby, doctor to the artistic (whose client list included Chopin, Liszt, George Sand, Dumas père et fils and Heine), suggested an esoteric diet. The day began with a soup made from a large variety of grains and vegetables; its visceral consequences were so volcanic that Daudet said death was preferable. In his last years he tried the Brown-Séquard treatment, a course of extremely painful injections with an elixir extracted from guinea pigs (one day the injector told Daudet that they had run out of guinea pigs, and were using extract of bulls’ testicles instead). At first the treatment – which Zola also took, in an attempt to increase his sexual powers – seemed beneficial, even miraculous; then, swiftly, it didn’t.
None of these doctors was a quack (Charles Edward Brown-Séquard, for instance, was professor of physiology and neuropathology at Harvard, and the first to show that epilepsy could be produced experimentally in guinea pigs); each was trying to outwit a then invincible disease. Daudet, like many other sufferers, came to rely on large quantities of palliative drugs: in particular chloral, bromide and morphine. At different times his wife, son Léon and father-in-law were all giving him morphine injections. In March 1887 Léon gave him two injections in a row but refused a third; so Daudet went to his father-in-law who gave him two more. (The father-in-law was also a morphine addict; the son preferred laudanum.) Increasingly, he injected himself, no easy task when you are both ataxic and extremely myopic. In June 1891 he reported giving himself five injections in a row; this despite the fact that the previous October he had been unable to find any place left on his body to inject.
His response, both personal and literary, to his condition was admirable. ‘Courage … means not scaring others,’ Larkin wrote. Numerous witnesses attest to Daudet’s exemplary behaviour. His last secretary, André Ebner, remembered Daudet sitting with a friend one morning, eyes closed, barely able to speak, martyred by pain. The door-knob gently turned, but before Mme Daudet could enter, her husband was on his feet, the colour back in his cheeks, laughter in his eye, his voice filled with reassurance about his condition. When the door closed again, Daudet collapsed back into his chair. ‘Suffering is nothing,’ he murmured. ‘It’s all a matter of preventing those you love from suffering.’ This is a difficult, correct (and nowadays unfashionable) position. It led