Le Petit Chose Reading Order

Le Petit Chose (1868) by Alphonse Daudet is a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about Daudet's own impoverished childhood in Lyon and his years of misery in Paris — the shame of being the poorest boy at school when his father's business failed, the humiliation of working as a study monitor in a provincial school before he could escape to the capital, the bohemian hand-to-mouth existence in Parisian garrets. The 'Petit Chose' (Little Thing) of the title is the nickname given to the protagonist Daniel Eyssette by the schoolchildren who torment him for his poverty and smallness, and the novel follows Daniel from childhood shame through Parisian struggle to a tentative, hard-won stability. The novel belongs to the tradition of Dickensian social autobiography (Daudet admired Dickens intensely and the influence shows), and it captures something specific about mid-nineteenth century French provincial poverty and the dream of the literary capital that pulled young men south to north. Though Daudet became more famous for Tartarin de Tarascon and the comic Provençal mode, Le Petit Chose shows his darker register: the humiliated child who grows into a writer partly because writing is the only available revenge on a world that mocked him.