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MOVING AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT SIGNED BYexcerpt from a chapter ofHistory of my books: Le Petit Chose, published in 1889 in Thirty years of Paris.

Daudet refers to the autobiographical sources in Chapter III of Part One, He is dead! Pray for him, in which Le Petit Chose, came home very late from school to learn of the illness and death of his older brother:

"Read the chapter entitled "he is dead pray for him..." a page from my life that is absolutely true. That's how we learned of my elder brother's death, and I still hear the cry of the poor father who guessed that his son had just died; so distressing, so poignant, that first great cry of human grief so close to me, that all night long, weeping and despairing, I found myself repeating "He's dead!..." in my father's intonation. This revealed the existence of my doublethe implacable witness, who in the midst of our mourning had retained, as in the theatre, the accuracy of a cry from my desolate lips. Alphonse Daudet. "

In the printed text, we find a more precise definition of this notion of double: "It was like an inner gaze, impassive and fixed, an inert and cold double which, during the most violent episodes of the Little Thing, observed everything, took notes and said the next day"Daudet also regrets "by rereading [sound] to find nothing of these confessions in the book, especially in the first part, where Daniel Eyssette's character so closely resembles my own.".

Rare document.