mirage. See Tartarin de Tarascon, chap

Daudet spent the winter of 1863-4 at a farm-house in Provence, a few miles east of Arles, near the western end of the ridge of hills which he has celebrated in the Tartarin romances as les Alpines. Some of the stories included in this volume were written at that time. The first of them appeared in a Paris newspaper in 1866, but the volume was not publbhed until 1869. Though Lettres de mon Moulin was his first prose volume, he sajrs of it twenty years later, **Cest encore là mon livre préféré.''^ For a review of its origin see his Trente Ans de Paris, publbhed in 1887.