Lecture en français langue étrangère (FLE) dans la collection Découverte destiné aux adolescents niveau A2.2. Les lettres de mon moulin Dans un décor provençal, entre la lavande et les pins, l'auteur, Alphonse Daudet, raconte plusieurs histoires. On découvre la vie quotidienne dans cette région du sud de la France au XIXe ÂÂ siècle. Six de ses contes très célèbres sont réunis dans cet ouvrage et mêlent gaieté et tristesse, émotion et poésie : Le Moulin, Le Secret de Maître Cornille, La Chèvre de Monsieur Seguin, L'Arlésienne, Le Curé de Cucugnan et Les étoiles.
Family on both sides belonged to the bourgeoisie. Vincent Daudet, the father, manufactured silk, but misfortune and failure dogged the man through life. A boyhood depressed Alphonse amid much truancy had. He spent his days mainly at Lyon, left in 1856, and began life as a schoolteacher at Alès, Gard, in the south. The position proved intolerable. As Charles Dickens declared that all through his prosperous career, the miseries of his apprenticeship to the blacking business haunted him in dreams, so after Daudet left Alès, he woke with horror, thinking for months that he still dwelt among his unruly pupils.
On 1 November 1857, he abandoned teaching and took refuge with Ernest Daudet, his brother only some three years his senior, who tried "soberly" to make a living as a journalist in Paris. Alphonse took to writing, and a small volume, Les Amoureuses (1858), collected his poems and met with a fair reception. He obtained employment on Le Figaro, then under energetic editorship of Cartier de Villemessant, and wrote two or three plays; those interested in literature began to recognize him as possessing individuality and promise. Morny, all-powerful minister of Napoleon III, appointed Daudet, who held a post of his secretaries till death of Morny in 1865, and Morny showed Daudet no small kindness. Daudet put his foot on the road to fortune.