THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 
MR. FREDERIC CHAPMAN, MR. ROBERT B. DOUGLAS, 
MR. A. W. EVANS, MKS. FARLEY, MR. LAFCADIO HEARN, 
MRS. W. S. JACKSON, MRS. JOHN LANE, MRS, NEWMARCH, 
MR. C. E, ROCHE, MISS WINIFRED STEPHENS, and Miss 
M. P. WILLCOCKs. 
" As Anatole Thibault, dit Anatole F rance, 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 manuscript ; he matriculated on the 
Quais with the old Jewish dealers of curios and objels d'art; 
he graduated in the great university of life and experience. 
Tt will be recognised that all his work is permeated by his 
youthful impressions ; he is, in fact, a virtuoso at large. 
@ 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. 
{ 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.”” 
Often he shows how divine humanity triumphs over 
mere asceticism, 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 in turn—like his own Choulette in THE RED 
LILY—saintly and Rabelaisian, yet without incongruity, 
