Contes du Lundi ( or “Monday Stories”) is a disparate but fascinating collection of short stories, long anecdotes, short vignettes, and plain old good reportage, gently fictionalized by the great French raconteur Alphonse Daudet, famous for Lettres de Mon Moulin, his picturesque tales of 19th century Provençale France.
What Daudet lacks in depicting characters--almost all are paint-by-number descriptions--he makes up for by his devoted and detailed recounting of places and predicaments, especially historical ones. Since we all now mostly have the attention span of a fruit fly, many readers will be too restless to allow the writer to lead them by the hand from one vivid but winding circumstance to the next. And yet, if you take the time to adapt to the slow pacing of the passages and their descriptions the result is a deeply gratifying pilgrimage into the quotidien past. In these stories--most of them inspired by or based on true events--Daudet is first and last a reporter, on the scene, taking down all the tiny details of daily life. Many of the stories veer in the end towards pathos, but several others are humorous, poking skewered fun at such human weakness as vanity, laziness or gluttony.
The first and best part of the book centers on and brings to life the the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and then the brief but tragic interlude of the Commune, which set disgruntled soldiers and workers on the far left against the centrist Republicans who ran France under the control of Adolphe Thiers, later president of the Third Republic. To understand the stories one really must have a passing knowledge of the Franco-Prussian War and of the Commune, and the ill-fated and grotesquely Pyrrhic infighting to seize Paris. Without some acquaintance with the facts the reader will become mired in wondering who is fighting on whose side, where, and why. Thus even a quick bit of Wikipedia-style research ahead of time will provide big dividends in understanding the decidedly confusing historical events as they unwound.
The stories, often sentimental, tell of a French school master in Alsace who is being forced to relieve his duties by the invading Prussians, a pair of elderly parents desperate to see their son on leave for only a few minutes, and a child who unwittingly betrays his country with the resulting death of his father. But God is in the details here, making each somewhat maudlin tale come vividly and painstakingly to life. In the course of his stories Daudet lovingly describes a ruined bridge months after it has been bombarded, deftly paints the portrait of poor Parisian women knitting and gossiping on their door sills, and zeroes in on the way peasants use wind from the ocean to help them winnow their wheat. Thus the stories offer a front row seat to life in the middle of the 19th century.
The second part of the book is less successful, a hodge-podge of accounts from different places, including Algeria, Sardinia, and Brittany, or small vignettes of lives poignantly lived. This section includes one of Daudet's most famous tales, "Les Trois Messes Basses," in which the devil tempts a Catholic priest on Christmas Eve to shortchange Midnight Mass in his hurry to get to the feast that will follow. There is also a very uncharacteristic story of a partridge, told in the first person, who with the help of a wise old rooster witnesses his first animal massacre at the hands of human hunters. It is told as usual with telling details and the same empathy and compassion Daudet bestows on many of the featherless bipeds of his other stories.
Ultimately Les Contes du Lundi is a vicarious time machine that entreats the 21st century reader to take their time to listen and to look, attentively and with curiosity, at a world that is now long gone but which we get to slowly savor in these pages.