In 1883 Turgenev had an operation in Paris for the removal of a neuroma in the lower abdomen. The doctors gave him ether rather than chloroform, and so he was conscious throughout the intervention. Afterwards, he was visited by his friend Alphonse Daudet, with whom he had often dined in the company of Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, Zola and others. "During the operation," Turgenev told him, "I thought about our dinners and tried to find the right words to convey exactly the sense of the steel slicing through my skin and entering my body... It was like a knife cutting into a banana." Goncourt, recording this anecdote, commented, "Our old friend Turgenev is a true man of letters."
How is it best to write about illness, and dying, and death? Despite Turgenev's impeccable example, pain is normally the enemy of the descriptive powers. When it became his turn to suffer, Daudet discovered that pain, like passion, drives out language. Words come "only when everything is over, when things have calmed down. They refer only to memory, and are either powerless or untruthful." The prospect of dying may, or may not, concentrate the mind and encourage a final truthfulness; may or may not include the useful aide-mémoire of your life passing before your eyes; but it is unlikely to make you a better writer. Modest or jaunty, wise or vainglorious, literary or journalistic, you will write no better, no worse. And your literary temperament may, or may not, prove suited to this new thematic challenge. When Harold Brodkey's heroic - and, it seemed, heroically self-deceiving - account of his own dying was published in The New Yorker, I congratulated the magazine's editor for "leaving it all in", by which I meant the evidence of Brodkey's impressive egomania. "You should have seen what we took out," she replied wryly.
Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) is a substantially forgotten writer nowadays. Novelist, playwright, journalist, he is viewed as a sunny humorist and clear stylist, creator in Lettres De Mon Moulin and Tartarin De Tarascon of an agreeable if partial Provence. He is offered to students of French as a nursery slope or climbing wall: practise on this. But in his day he was not only highly successful (and very rich) he also ate at the top literary table. Dickens called him "my little brother in France"; Henry James "a great little novelist"; Goncourt " mon petit Daudet ". As may be deduced, he was short of stature. He was also kind, generous and sociable, a passionate observer and an unstoppable talker. These qualities transfer into his fiction. He was, in various descriptions (all of them from Henry James), "the happiest novelist of his day", "beyond comparison the most charming story-teller of the day", "an observer not perhaps of the deepest things of life, but of the whole realm of the immediate, the expressive, the actual". As these assessments, laudatory yet limiting, imply, Daudet was the sort of writer - hard-working, honourable, popular - whose fame and relevance are largely used up in his own lifetime.
If Daudet dined in the highest company, he was also a member of a less enviable 19th-century French club: that of literary syphilitics. Here again, he is somewhat overshadowed: the Big Three were Baudelaire, Flaubert and Maupassant. Daudet probably ranks fourth equal with Jules de Goncourt, Edmond's younger brother. He could at least claim that the syphilis he acquired, shortly after his arrival in Paris at the age of 17, came from a classier, indeed more literary, source than theirs. He caught it from a lectrice de la cour, a woman employed to read aloud at the imperial court. She was, he assured Edmond de Goncourt, a lady "from the top drawer".
Daudet was treated, as was customary for much of the 19th century, with mercury: giving rise to the joke about "spending one night with Venus and the rest of your life with Mercury". The disease then remained dormant for more than 20 years: Daudet worked, published, became famous, married (in 1867) and had three children. He also continued an active, carefree, careless sex life. From the time he lost his virginity at the age of 12, he had always been "a real villain" in matters of sex, he once confessed; he slept with many of his friends' mistresses; about 10 times a year he felt the need for the sort of "ordure" he could not ask his wife to permit. Drink for him led inevitably to debauchery (and contrition, and forgiveness); but then so did many other things. In 1884 he had an operation for a hydrocele. Having a grossly swollen testicle painfully drained (and then drained again when the first operation didn't work) would probably make most men sleep in their trousers for weeks; Daudet's reaction was to go straight out in search of sex. In 1889 he reported to Goncourt a dream in which he found himself caught up in the Last Judgment and defending himself against a sentence of 3,500 years in hell for "the crime of sensuality".
At first, the syphilis began to reassert itself as "rheumatism", severe fatigue and haemorrhages. Such symptoms could be explained away. But by the early 1880s it became increasingly clear that Daudet was suffering from the form of neurosyphilis known as tabes dorsalis: literally, a wasting of the back. Its chief manifestations in his case were locomotor ataxia - progressively clumsy and uncoordinated movement - and paralysis. In 1885 J-M Charcot, the greatest neurologist of the day, declared him "lost"; Daudet was to live another 12 years after this, in increasing pain and debility. He saw a range of specialists and visited a range of thermal establishments, taking the waters and mud-baths. He tried all the latest treatments, no matter how violent and outlandish. Charcot recommended the Seyre suspension, in which the patient was hung up, some of the time by the jaw alone, for several minutes. This was intended to stretch the patient's spine, loosen his joints, and thus combat the effects of ataxia. Daudet was suspended 13 times, in excruciating pain, until he began coughing blood. He noted of the treatment: "No observable benefit."
David Gruby, a Hungarian doctor to artistic Paris (whose client list included Chopin, Liszt, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas père et fils and Heine), suggested an esoteric diet. The day began with a soup made from a large variety of grains and vegetables; its visceral consequences were so volcanic that Daudet said death was preferable. In his last years he tried the Brown-Sequard treatment, a course of extremely painful injections with an elixir extracted from guinea pigs (one day the injector told Daudet that they had run out of guinea pigs, and were using extract of bulls' testicles instead). At first the treatment - which Zola also took in an attempt to increase his sexual powers - seemed beneficial, even miraculous; then, swiftly, it didn't.
None of these doctors was a quack (Brown-Sequard, for instance, was the first to show that epilepsy could be produced experimentally in guinea pigs); each was trying to outwit a then invincible disease. Daudet, like many other sufferers, came to rely on large quantities of palliative drugs: in particular chloral, bromide and morphine. At different times his wife, son Léon and father-in-law were all giving him morphine injections. In March 1887 Léon gave him two injections in a row but refused a third; so Daudet went to his father-in-law who gave him two more. (The father-in-law was also a morphine addict; the son preferred laudanum.) Increasingly, he injected himself, no easy task when you are both ataxic and extremely myopic. In June 1891 he reported giving himself five injections in a row; this despite the fact that the previous October he had been unable to find any place left in his body to inject.
His response, both personal and literary, to his condition was admirable. "Courage... means not scaring others," Larkin wrote. Numerous witnesses attest to Daudet's exemplary behaviour. His last secretary, André Ebner, remembered Daudet sitting with a friend one morning, eyes closed, barely able to speak, martyred by pain. The door-knob gently turned, but before Mme Daudet could enter, her husband was on his feet, the colour back in his cheeks, laughter in his eye, his voice filled with reassurance about his condition. When the door closed again Daudet collapsed back into his chair. "Suffering is nothing," he murmured. "It's all a matter of preventing those you love from suffering."
This is a difficult, correct (and nowadays unfashionable) position. It led Daudet to familiarity with all the ironies and paradoxes of long-term suffering. Surrounded by those you love, and unwilling to inflict pain on them, you deliberately talk down your suffering, and thus deprive yourself of the comfort you crave. Next, you discover that your pain, while always new to you, quickly becomes repetitive and banal to your intimates: you fear becoming a symptoms bore. Meanwhile the anticipation of indignities to come - and the terror of disgusting those you love - makes suicide not just tempting but logical; the catch is that those you love have already insisted that you live, if only for them.
Daudet's other response was to write about his predicament. He started taking notes - on his symptoms and suffering, fears and reflections, and on the strange social life of his fellow-patients at shower-bath and thermal establishments. He never found the right form for his book, but he always knew what he wanted to call it: La Doulou. It sounds a slightly babyish title - Edmond de Goncourt considered it "abominable" - but the word is, in fact, the Provençal word for la douleur , pain; and it was under this title that his 60 or so pages of notes were published, long posthumously, in 1930.
While disliking the title, Goncourt was confident that the result would be "superb", as Daudet would have lived the book, even "lived it too much". Goncourt was right: Daudet was "a true man of letters" in the Turgenev sense. In his fiction, he often wrote close to his own life; here he is writing close to his own death. The result is well-described by Léon Daudet as a "terrible and implacable breviary".
I first came across La Doulou when I was researching my novel Flaubert's Parrot and seeking points of literary-syphilitic comparison. I remember from that first reading Daudet's early description of himself as "vaulting from forty-five to sixty-five" and suddenly finding that there were 20 years of life which had simply disappeared. What struck me most about the text was that it was heroically unheroic. What happens around illness may be dramatic and courageous; but illness itself is ordinary, day-to-day, boring. Turgenev compared himself to a banana; Daudet, when caught in a frenzied bout of locomotor ataxia, his leg hopelessly out of control, reminded himself of a knife-grinder. (The comparison may be lost on some modern readers: until a few decades ago itinerant knife-grinders would trundle the streets with circular stones mounted on wheeled carriers; to make the stone revolve at a speed sufficient to sharpen your knives and shears, they would pump frantically up and down on a pedal.) The image is exact, unheroic, and taken from daily life.
Daudet notes that he has "no general theory about pain. Each patient discovers his own, and the nature of pain varies, like a singer's voice, according to the acoustics of the hall." The young Proust could scarcely look Daudet in the eye when they first met, because he felt ashamed at his own inability to bear the mildest pain. Proust was astonished by the way "the beautiful sick man" that Daudet had become was still able to hold forth on life and literature. At one point he left the room but continued the discussion through the open doorway, while evidently giving himself a morphine injection. He returned with sweat on his brow but exuding what Proust calls "the serenity of victory".
Of course he knew that no final victory was possible: it was just a question of how you handled inevitable defeat. Daudet's attitude was to treat his illness as an unwanted guest, to whom no special attention is accorded; daily life should continue as normally as possible. "I don't believe I will get better, and nor does Charcot. Yet I always behave as if my damned pains were going to disappear by tomorrow morning." This is how he comported himself socially; but intellectually there was no turning-away from the unwanted guest. "The executioner has a great many kinds of instrument at his disposal; if they do not scare you too much, examine them carefully. It is with our torments as it is with shadows. Attention clears them up and drives them away."
Yet only for a while; the shadows always return. Daudet's greatest fear was that he would descend into what he calls "a living tomb": total paralysis, aphasia, and imbecility. This had happened to Jules de Goncourt, and also to Maupassant, who had spent his last 18 months in a lunatic asylum. Daudet was spared this final obliteration. In September 1897 he and his family moved to a new apartment in Paris, 41 rue de l'Université. (Goncourt had noted in his diary that the first thing his friend did when he changed address was look for where his coffin was likely to rest.) Two months later, he was having dinner, surrounded by his wife and children, talking about Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, which had just gone into general rehearsal. He took a few spoonfuls of soup and was chatting away when he fell back in his chair and died.
He had no illusions about immortality. He and Goncourt had discussed the matter in 1891. Goncourt outlined his own beliefs: that death means complete annihilation, that we are mere ephemeral gatherings of matter, and that even if there were a God, expecting him to provide a second existence for every single one of us would be laying far too great a book-keeping job on Him. Daudet agreed with all this, and then recounted to Goncourt a dream he had once had, in which he was walking through a field of broom. All around him there was the soft background noise of seed-pods exploding. Our lives, he had concluded, amount to no more than this: just a quiet crackle of popping pods.
My agony by Alphonse Daudet
Every evening, a hideously painful spasm in the ribs. I read, for a long time, sitting up in bed - the only position I can endure. I'm a poor old wounded Don Quixote, sitting on his arse in his armour at the foot of a tree.
Armour is exactly what it feels like, a hoop of steel cruelly crushing my lower back. Hot coals, stabs of pain as sharp as needles. Then chloral, the tin-tin of my spoon in the glass, and peace at last.
This breastplate has had me in its grip for months. I can't undo the straps; I can't breathe...
Since learning that I've got it for ever - and my God, what a short "for ever" that is going to be - I've readjusted myself and started taking these notes. I'm making them by dipping the point of a nail in my own blood and scratching on the walls of my carcere duro [punitive imprisonment].
All I ask is not to have to change cell, not to have to descend into an in pace, down there where everything's black, and thought no longer exists...
The clever way death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out. Generations never fall with one blow - that would be too sad and too obvious. Death prefers to do it piecemeal. The meadow is attacked from several sides at the same time. One of us goes one day; another some time afterwards; you have to stand back and look around you to take in what's missing, to grasp the vast slaughter of your generation...
From time to time, a memory of the active life, of happier times. For instance, those Neapolitan coral-fishermen among the rocks, in the evening. The epitome of physical well-being...
Return to childhood. To reach that distant chair, to cross that waxed corridor, requires as much effort and ingenuity as Stanley deploys in the African jungle...
I only know one thing, and that is to shout to my children, "Long live Life!' But it's so hard to do, while I am ripped apart by pain.
· Adapted from Julian Barnes's introduction to In The Land Of Pain by Alphonse Daudet. The book, translated and edited by Julian Barnes, is published by Cape on May 23 at £10. To order a copy for £8 plus p&p, call the Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.