L£ON DAUDET 93
rightly or wrongly, that the one was more of a blow than the
other.
But it is not as a novelist or as a politician that Daudet will be
remembered, but primarily as a memoir-writer, and to a lesser
degree, as a critic. His family, his talents, his impudence (or his
lack of diffidence) gained him admission to very varied circles in
Paris, and he enjoyed all the rich possibilities that were thus opened
to his talents ^as a chronicler of scandal. His medical training
affected his mind and style, and it was Parisian intellectual and
political society seen with a clinician's eye and from a dogmatic
political standpoint that provides the main staple of the Souvenirs.
Again, as a memorialist, Daudet suffered in comparison with
Gide and Jules Renard, and still more in comparison with his
literary protege, Proust. There is no great subtlety in the dramatic
contrasts of the patriots and traitors. There is no great respect paid
to the readers cutical judgment in the telling of the scabrous
anecdotes which were piled up to show that the rulers of the
Republic were knaves in private as in public matters. No historian
would use the many volumes of reminiscence with anything but the
greatest prudence. But he would be wise to use them all the same.
They may lack truth of formal statement, but they have flavour,'
they have gusto. Of course, the taste is bad; Daudet smelled sexual
or pathological weakness everywhere, and even his strong party
spirit could not suppress his taste for scandal. No doubt Syveton-
was a martyr; his enemies blackguards as well as traitors; Andr6
and Combes canaille; yet, Daudet conveys, maybe there was some-
thing in what they said. Syveton was a good Nationalist, but the
charges of " Anti-France" were not implausible.
But it is not as the compiler of a new secret history, as a Parisian
Procopius, that Daudet is valuable and entertaining. He was a good
witness to the internal politics of the Right; his caustic comments
on the old ^Orleamst leaders provide materials for a new Fin des
Notables. The incoherence of the Right, its total political incom-
petence, is made plain. It is also made funny. For Daudet's sense
of humour, though cruel and crude, was real. It was his humour,
that won him many secret readers on the Left. And it was his
humour that ensured that many loyal readers of the Action Frangaise