THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 



ROBERT B. DOUGLAS, MR. A. W. EVANS, MRS. FARLEY, 

 MRS. JOHN LANE, MRS. NEWMARCH, MR. C. E. ROCHE, MISS 

 WINIFRED STEPHENS, and MISS M. P. WILLCOCKS. 



II As Anatole Thibault, dit Anatole France, is to most 

 English readers merely a name, it will be well to state that 

 he was born in 1844 in the picturesque and inspiring 

 surroundings of an old bookshop on the Quai Voltaire, 

 Paris, kept by his father. Monsieur Thibault, an authority on 

 eighteenth-century history, from whom the boy caught the 

 passion for the principles of the Revolution, while from his 

 mother he was learning to love the ascetic ideals chronicled 

 in the Lives of the Saints. He was schooled with the lovers 

 of old books, missals and manuscripts ; he matriculated on 

 the Quais with the old Jewish dealers of curios and o^y^^^i'ar/ ; 

 he graduated in the great university of life and experience. 

 It will be recognised that all his work is permeated by his 

 youthful impressions ; he is, in fact, a virtuoso at large. 



H He has written about thirty volumes of fiction. His 

 first novel was JOCASTA ^ THE FAMISHED CAT 

 (1879). THE CRIME OF SYLVESTRE BONNARD 

 appeared in 1881, and had the distinction of being crowned 

 by the French Academy, into which he was received in 1896. 



f His work is illuminated with style, scholarship, and 

 psychology ; but its outstanding features are the lambent wit, 

 the gay mockery, the genial irony with which he touches every 

 subject he treats. But the wit is never malicious, the mockery 

 never derisive, the irony never barbed. To quote from his own 

 GARDEN OF EPICURUS : "Irony and Pity are both of 

 good counsel ; the first with her smiles makes life agreeable, 

 the other sanctifies it to us with her tears. The Irony I 

 invoke is no cruel deity. She mocks neither love nor 

 beauty. She is gentle and kindly disposed. Her mirth 

 disarms anger and it is she teaches us to laugh at rogues and 

 fools whom but for her we might be so weak as to hate." 



H Often he shows how divine humanity triumphs ovei 

 mere ascetism, and with entire reverence ; indeed, he 

 might be described as an ascetic overflowing with humanity, 

 just as he has been termed a "pagan, but a pagan 

 constantly haunted by the pre-occupation of Christ." 

 He is ii? turn — like his own Choulette in THE RED 

 LILY — saintly and Rabelaisian, yet without incongruity. 



