PREFACE

Anatole France was born in Paris in 1844 and died in 1924. For the last twenty-five years of his life he was the recognized leader of French letters, and for some time before his death he enjoyed world-wide fame. He produced some fifty volumes, including poetry, drama, criticism, history, fiction, and miscellaneous philosophical reflections. Although he rarely attempted the formal novel, it was in the field of fiction that he did his best work and attained his greatest reputation. His stories range from starkly realistic pictures of contemporary life to whimsical and imaginative interpretations of the past. His works are permeated with learning, varied, and sometimes profound, but never pedantic.

Professedly unsystematic, a true dilettante — eager to know and to comprehend solely for the sake of knowing and comprehending — Anatole France was profoundly and subtly intelligent. While fuUy conscious of the limitations and the drawbacks of thought, he considered it one of the few realities of this illusory imiverse. A dreamer as well as a thinker, he was from childhood stirred by the insoluble mystery of the universe. He was keenly alive to pleasure, sensuous, æsthetic, and intellectual. Impatient of restraint and discipline, he regarded morality as merely conventional. Intellectually he was a pure sceptic, but his scepticism was tempered by sympathy and generosity. He took as guiding principles irony, which, “smiling, makes life lovable for us,” and pity, which, “weeping, makes it sacred to us.”

The most striking traits of Anatole France’s books are the prevalence of general ideas and their subjective character. Many of them are largely autobiographic. Owing to his lack