Sanguinaires Lighthouse and other tales by Alphonse Daudet (1929)

These tales form 'Volume III' of a one-volume edition published in 1929. I have never seen the 'volumes' included published separately. These stories carry on the more traditional strain of Daudet's output - they are contes, in the sense of being short pieces, fictional or not, which have the quality of sketches; drawings from life. There are nine of them, ranging from a haunting burst of gloom in the title piece about a Corsican lighthouse, to wry comedy about human frailty in The Drummer, to little exclamatory slices of life expressed poetically like Ah! Paris, Paris! My favourite is the pastoral and dreamy Protected by Stars, about a young shepherd and his fascination for the daughter of his master, who is marooned with him on a dark stormy night. These, at least, are not syphilitic Daudet, whose more worldly and harsh elements had forefronted in a previous volume. The remaining sections in this compilation consist in part of three of Daudet's novels, only one of which is popularly known in English, that being Sapho. I look forward to it and the far lesser known Kings in Exile and A Passion of the South with interest. He doesn't as yet strike me as a writer I can be passionate about, but perhaps the novels will force a change.