About the book: 1965 / The series "Stories on Mondays" was created by Alphonse Daudet at a difficult time for him, when financial difficulties caused by the need to pay his father's debts forced The Daudet family left Paris and settled in Chanrose. Daudet wrote parallel stories and the novel “Fromont the Younger and Risler the Elder.” The stories of 1872–1873 were compiled into two books: “Wives of Artists” and “Stories on Mondays”, the latter was published by the Lemerre publishing house in 1873. “Stories on Mondays” in the first part are united thematically - entirely devoted to the Franco-Prussian War and the separation of Alsace from France. The second part contains stories on various topics; they seem to sum up the first period of Daudet’s work. Here you can find a fragment of his autobiography (“The Pope Died”), in which, according to Daudet, he “gave a sketch of the troubled times” depicted in “The Kid,” and sketches of Paris (“The Recorder,” “Chowder with Cheese”), similar to those with which the writer made his debut in newspapers, and such stories as “Christmas Eve in the Mar” and “Ryzhik’s Excitement”, echoing similar short stories from “Letters from the Mill”».