Alphonse Daudet, a nineteenth-century French writer, died of neurosyphilis in 1897. He wrote a series of notes for a narrative of his own illness, titled La Doulou, which he never had a chance to complete. Daudet was seen as a ‘sunny humorist and clear stylist’ during his own time. He wrote novels, plays and articles, and was not only ‘highly successful (and very rich)’ in his day but also ‘ate at the top literary table’. Dickens called Daudet ‘my little brother in France’ and Henry James called him ‘a great little novelist’ (Barnes 2002: vi). Only his notes to La Doulou were ever published – the original version in 1930, and the first English translation, In the Land of Pain, in 2002.

As his disease advanced, Daudet's mobility was impaired. During this time, he was attracted to books about adventure in far-off lands, likening such travel narratives to the progression of his own illness. Daudet particularly enjoyed stories of African exploration by David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley. In one of the earliest entries, Daudet says,

Daudet's disease creates a new landscape; navigating pain is as arduous for him as navigating the tropics is for an African explorer. He makes the comparison explicit: ‘To reach that distant chair, to cross that waxed corridor, requires as much effort and ingenuity as Stanley deploys in the African jungle’ (47). However, this passage also undercuts the traditional association of imperial adventure with progress. Livingstone, the idol of African exploration, Daudet refers to as ‘good old Livingstone’ he terms Livingstone's journeys monotonous, ‘endless’ and ‘virtually pointless’. The ‘constant obsession with barometric pressure’ is also an obsession with environmental pathology, and Daudet here seems to imply that though such an obsession may give comfort to the traveller by creating an illusion of control, the ‘barometer’ provides no real answers.