ANATOLE FRANCE

(1844-)

NATOLE FRANCE, whose real name of Thibault is sunk in his literary signature, was born in Paris, April 16th, 1844. His father, a wealthy bookseller, seems to have been a thoughtful, meditative man, and his mother a woman of great refinement and tenderness. Their son shows the result of the double influence. Always fond of books, he early devoted himself to literary work, and made his début as writer in 1868 in a biographical study of Alfred de Vigny. This was shortly followed by two volumes of poetry: 'Les Poèmes Dorés' (Golden Verses) and 'Les Noces Corinthéennes' (Corinthian Revels). Since this work of his youth he has published at least twelve novels and romances, of which the most familiar are: 'Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard' (The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard), 'Le Livre de Mon Ami (My Friend's Book), 'Le Lys Rouge (The Red Lily), and 'Les Désirs de Jean Servieu' (Jean Servieu's Wishes). Several volumes of essays, critical introductions to splendid editions of Racine, Molière, La Fontaine, and Le Sage, of 'Manon Lescaut' and 'Paul and Virginia,' numberless studies of men and books for the reviews and journals, these measure the tireless industry of an incessant worker. In 1876 M. France became an attaché of the Library of the Senate. In December 1896 he was received as member of the French Academy, succeeding to the chair of Ferdinand de Lesseps, whose eulogy he pronounced with exquisite taste. and grace.

ANATOLE FRANCE

Like Renan, whose disciple he is, this fine artist was formed in the clerical schools. His perfection of style, clear, distinguished, scintillating with wit and fancy, furnishes, as a distinguished French critic remarks, a strong contrast to the painful and heavy periods of the literary products of a State education. He is an enthusiastic humanist, a fervent Neo-Hellenist, delicately sensitive to the beauty of the antique, the magic of words, and the harmony of phrase.

Outside of France, his best known works are 'Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard' (crowned by the Academy) and 'Le Livre de Mon

Ami.' The first of these expresses the author's Hellenism, sentiment, experience, love of form, and gentle pessimism. Into the character of Sylvestre Bonnard, that intelligent, contemplative, ironical, sweetnatured old philosopher, he has put most of himself. In 'Le Livre de Mon Ami' are reflected the childhood and youth of the author. It is a living book, made out of the impulses of the heart, holding the very essence of moral grace, written with exquisite irony absolutely free from bitterness.

It is to be regretted that in some of his later writings this charming writer has fallen short of the standard of these works, though the versatility of talent he displays is great and admirable. In 'Thaïs' he has painted the magnificent Alexandria of the Ptolemies; in 'Le Lys Rouge' the Florence of to-day. In 'La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pedauque' (The Cook-Shop of the Queen Pedauque) and in 'Les Opinions de M. Jérome Coignard,' Gil Blas, Rabelais, Wilhelm Meister, and Montaigne seem to jostle each other. In 'Le Jardin d'Épicure (The Garden of Epicurus) a modern Epicurus, discreet, indulgent, listless, listens to lively discussions between the shades of Plato, Origen, Augustine, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, while an Esquimaux refutes Bossuet, a Polynesian develops his theory of the soul, and Cicero and Cousin agree in their estimate of a future life.

In his own words, M. Anatole France has always been inclined to take life as a spectacle, offering no solution of its perplexities, proposing no remedies for its ills. His literary quality, as M. Jules Lemaître observes, owes little or nothing to the spirit or literature of the North. His intelligence is the pure and extreme product of Greek and Latin tradition.

IN THE GARDENS

From The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard. Copyright, 1890, by Harper & Brothers

ST

APRIL 16.

T. DROCTOVEUS and the early abbots of Saint-Germain-des-Prés have been occupying me for the past forty years; but I do not know whether I shall be able to write their history before I go to join them. It is already quite a long time since I became an old man. One day last year, on the Pont des Arts, one of my fellow-members at the Institute was lamenting before me over the ennui of becoming old.

"Still," Sainte-Beuve replied to him, "it is the only way that has yet been found of living a long time."

I have tried this way, and I know just what it is worth. The trouble of it is not that one lasts too long, but that one sees all about him pass away-mother, wife, friends, children. Nature makes and unmakes all these divine treasures with gloomy indifference, and at last we find that we have not loved,-- we have only been embracing shadows. But how sweet some shadows are! If ever creature glided like a shadow through the life of a man, it was certainly that young girl whom I fell in love with when incredible though it now seems-I was myself a youth.

A Christian sarcophagus from the catacombs of Rome bears a formula of imprecation, the whole terrible meaning of which I only learned with time. It says: "Whatsoever impious man violates this sepulchre, may he die the last of his own people!" In my capacity of archæologist I have opened tombs and disturbed. ashes, in order to collect the shreds of apparel, metal ornaments, or gems that were mingled with those ashes. But I did it only through that scientific curiosity which does not exclude the feelings of reverence and of piety. May that malediction graven by some one of the first followers of the Apostles upon a martyr's tomb never fall upon me! I ought not to fear to survive my own people so long as there are men in the world; for there are always some whom one can love.

But the power of love itself weakens and gradually becomes lost with age, like all the other energies of man. Example proves it; and it is this which terrifies me. Am I sure that I have not myself already suffered this great loss? I should surely have felt it, but for the happy meeting which has rejuvenated me. Poets speak of the Fountain of Youth: it does exist; it gushes up from the earth at every step we take. And one passes by without drinking of it!

The young girl I loved, married of her own choice to a rival, passed, all gray-haired, into the eternal rest. I have found her daughter so that my life, which before seemed to me without utility, now once more finds a purpose and a reason for being.

To-day I take the sun," as they say in Provence; I take it on the terrace of the Luxembourg, at the foot of the statue of Marguerite de Navarre. It is a spring sun, intoxicating as young wine. I sit and dream. My thoughts escape from my head like the foam from a bottle of beer. They are light, and their fizzing amuses me. I dream; such a pastime is certainly permissible to an old fellow who has published thirty volumes of texts, and

contributed to the Journal des Savants for twenty-six years. I have the satisfaction of feeling that I performed my task as well as it was possible for me, and that I utilized to their fullest extent these mediocre faculties with which nature endowed me. My efforts were not all in vain, and I have contributed, in my own modest way, to that renaissance of historical labors which will remain the honor of this restless century. I shall certainly be counted among those ten or twelve who revealed to France her own literary antiquities. My publication of the poetical works of Gautier de Coincy inaugurated a judicious system and made a date. It is in the austere calm of old age that I decree to myself this deserved credit, and God, who sees my heart, knows whether pride or vanity have aught to do with this selfaward of justice.

But I am tired; my eyes are dim; my hand trembles, and I see an image of myself in those old men of Homer, whose weakness excluded them from the battle, and who, seated upon the ramparts, lifted up their voices like crickets among the leaves.

So my thoughts were wandering, when three young men seated themselves near me. I do not know whether each one of them had come in three boats, like the monkey of La Fontaine, but the three certainly displayed themselves over the space of twelve chairs. I took pleasure in watching them, not because they had anything very extraordinary about them, but because I discerned in them that brave joyous manner which is natural to youth. They were from the schools. I was less assured of it by the books they were carrying than by the character of their physiognomy. For all who busy themselves with the things of the mind can be at once recognized by an indescribable something which is common to all of them. I am very fond of young people; and these pleased me, in spite of a certain provoking wild manner which recalled to me my own college days with marvelous vividness. But they did not wear velvet doublets and long hair, as we used to do; they did not walk about, as we used to do, with a death's-head; they did not cry out, as we used to do, "Hell and malediction!" They were quite properly dressed, and neither their costume nor their language had anything suggestive of the Middle Ages. I must also add that they paid considerable attention to the women passing on the terrace, and expressed their admiration of some of them in very animated language. But their reflections, even on this subject, were not of a character to

5913

oblige me to flee from my seat. Besides, so long as youth is studious, I think it has a right to its gayeties.

One of them having made some gallant pleasantry which I forget, the smallest and darkest of the three exclaimed, with a slight Gascon accent:

"What a thing to say! Only physiologists like us have any right to occupy ourselves about living matter. As for you, Gélis, who only live in the past,-like all your fellow archivists and paleographers, you will do better to confine yourself to those stone women over there, who are your contemporaries."

And he pointed to the statues of the Ladies of Ancient France which towered up, all white, in a half-circle under the trees of the terrace. This joke, though in itself trifling, enabled me to know that the young man called Gélis was a student at the École des Chartes. From the conversation which followed I was able to learn that his neighbor, blond and wan almost to diaphaneity, taciturn and sarcastic, was Boulmier, a fellow-student. Gélis and the future doctor (I hope he will become one some day) discoursed together with much fantasy and spirit. In the midst of the loftiest speculations they would play upon words, and make jokes after the peculiar fashion of really witty persons— that is to say, in a style of enormous absurdity. I need hardly say, I suppose, that they only deigned to maintain the most monstrous kind of paradoxes. They employed all their powers of imagination to make themselves as ludicrous as possible, and all their powers of reasoning to assert the contrary of common-sense. All the better for them! I do not like to see young folks too rational.

The student of medicine, after glancing at the title of the book that Boulmier held in his hand, exclaimed:

"Yes," replied Boulmier very gravely. "I like novels."

Gélis, who dominated both by his fine stature, imperious gestures, and ready wit, took the book, turned over a few pages rapidly, and said:

"Michelet always had a great propensity to emotional tenderness. He wept sweet tears over Maillard, that nice little man who introduced la paperasserie into the September massacres. But as emotional tenderness leads to fury, he becomes all at once furious against the victims. There is no help for it. It is the sentimentality of the age. The assassin is pitied, but the victim