In the Land of Pain

In his last years the novelist Alphonse Daudet, author of Letters from My Windmill, kept notes on the pain of tabes dorsalis, a late stage of syphilis. He recorded the drugs and treatments he tried and what illness did to his friendships and family life, intending a book he never finished. The fragments were published in French in 1930 as La Doulou, a Provençal word for pain, and translated into English in 2002 by Julian Barnes.