Le Petit Chose (1868) is a semiautobiographical novel touchingly descriptive of his life at boarding school and sometimes compared to Dickens's David Copperfield. It was followed in rapid succession by Aventures prodigieuses de Tartarin de Tarascon (1872), Contes du lundi (1873), Fromont jeune et Risler aîné (1874), Jack (1876), Le Nabab (1877), Les Rois en exil (1879), Numa Roumestan (1881), L'Évangeliste (1883), Sapho (1884), La Belle Nivernaise (1886), and L'Immortel (1888). Daudet was at once objective and personal, and his works, permeated by an engaging sense of humor, wistfulness, and subtle irony, were drawn largely from his own experience. Two volumes of reminiscences, Souvenirs d'un homme de lettres and Trente ans de Paris, appeared in 1888. Harrowing diaries of his lingering death from syphilis, La Doulou, were not published until 1930 (tr. In the Land of Pain, 2003). His brother, Louis Marie Ernst Daudet (1837-1921), was a historian. His son was Léon Daudet.