Alphonse Daudet

Alphonse Daudet was a French novelist from Provence who came to Paris at seventeen and made his name with Tartarin of Tarascon, a comic Provençal braggart the south never forgave him for. A friend of Zola and Flaubert, he wrote realist novels of Parisian business and hypocrisy. Syphilis crippled his last years, and the notes he kept on the pain were published long after his death.