page_title: Alphonse Daudet
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Alphonse Daudet / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Alphonse Daudet. Image (rounded corners): 22.2 x 17.3 cm (8 3/4 x 6 13/16 in.). (Recto, print) inscribed in black ink, at upper center: "Alph. Daudet"
context_page_description: Alphonse Daudet was a French novelist. He was the husband of Julia Daudet and father of Edmée Daudet, and writers Léon Daudet and Lucien Daudet.
context_section_description: Daudet was born in Nîmes, France. His family, on both sides, belonged to the bourgeoisie. His father, Vincent Daudet, was a silk manufacturer — a man dogged through life by misfortune and failure. Alphonse, amid much truancy, had a depressing boyhood. In 1856 he left Lyon, where his schooldays had been mainly spent, and began his career as a schoolteacher at Alès, Gard, in the south of France. The position proved to be intolerable and Daudet said later that for months after leaving Alès he would wake with horror, thinking he was friend of Cervantes.
  On 1 November 1857, he abandoned teaching and took refuge with his brother Ernest Daudet, only some three years his senior, who was trying, "and thereto soberly," to make a living as a journalist in Paris. Alphonse took to writing, and his poems were collected into a small volume, Les Amoureuses (1858), which met with a fair reception.  He obtained employment on Le Figaro, then under Cartier de Villemessant's energetic editorship, wrote two or three plays, and began to be recognized in literary communities as possessing distinction and promise. Morny, Napoleon III's all-powerful minister, appointed him to be one of his secretaries — a post which he held till Morny's death in 1865.
caption: Alphonse Daudet, circa 1860
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