But Fortune did not smile on the Daudet family at Lyons any more than at Nimes. After ten years of hard and bitter struggles, the home was broken up. M. Daudet became traveller for a firm of wine-merchants in the North, his wife and daughter remained in the South. Ernest - who had on leaving school acted as bookkeeper to his father, then as a receiver of pledges in a pawn broker's shop, and lastly as a clerk in a forwarding office - went to Paris to try his fortune in the world of letters, whilst Alphonse was sent as an usher to a college at Alais, for his father was unable to pay the fees for his final school examination. Louis Marie Alphonse Daudet was a French novelist. He was the younger brother of Ernest Daudet. He was married to Julia Daudet and the father of Léon Daudet, Lucien Daudet and Edmée Daudet, all writers. Family on both sides belonged to the bourgeoisie. The father, Vincent Daudet, was a silk manufacturer — a man dogged through life by misfortune and failure. Alphonse, amid much truancy, had a depressing boyhood. In 1856 he left Lyon, where his schooldays had been mainly spent, and began life as a schoolteacher at Alès, Gard, in the south of France. The position proved to be intolerable. As Dickens declared that all through his prosperous career he was haunted in dreams by the miseries of his apprenticeship to the blacking business, so Daudet says that for months after leaving Alès he would wake with horror, thinking he was still among his unruly pupils.On 1 November 1857, he abandoned teaching and took refuge with his brother Ernest Daudet, only some three years his senior, who was trying, "and thereto soberly," to make a living as a journalist in Paris. Alphonse took to writing, and his poems were collected into a small volume, Les Amoureuses (1858), which met with a fair reception. He obtained employment on Le Figaro, then under Cartier de Villemessant's energetic editorship, wrote two or three plays, and began to be recognized, among those interested in literature, as possessing individuality and promise. Morny, Napoleon III's all-powerful minister, appointed him to be one of his secretaries — a post which he held till Morny's death in 1865 — and showed Daudet no small kindness. Daudet had put his foot on the road to fortune. Le Petit Chose, translated into English as Little Good-For-Nothing and Little What's-His-Name, is an autobiographical memoir by French author Alphonse Daudet.