BIOGRAPHY OF ANATOLE FRANCE

The story of a man of letters is rarely an eventful and romantic one. In the case of Anatole France the biography is merely the recital of his literary productions.

Anatole France is a Parisian. It was his good fortune that he never had to leave Paris to earn his living through the drudgery of a provincial career. In his native city he found a congenial occupation until the success of his works assured him a competency and allowed him to live a quiet and comfortable life in the midst of his precious books and art treasures, working at his leisure and writing as he was moved, without the feverish haste that characterizes so many literary men.

The environment as well as the education of Anatole France prepared him for his career. At the beginning of the sixth chapter of Ze Zivre de mon Ami he describes in a charming manner that Quai Malaquais where he was born April 16, 1844, and which the booksellers and antiquarians have transformed into a permanent exhibition of old books, rare etchings

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and beautiful bindings. In this special milieu the young Jacques Anatole Thibault, now universally known as Anatole France, could not help becoming a lover, a connoisseur and finally a writer of books.

He was a precocious, sensitive and nervous child. His mother, a tender and pious woman, had a romantic mind, loved fairy tales and cultivated her son’s imagination : to her, very likely, he owes that gentle refinement and kindness of heart that pervades /e Livre de mon Ami and most of his books. His father was from Anjou, a section in Western France which, from the Revolution down to the present day, has been a hotbed of monarchism and clericalism; he was by trade a bookseller and his store was patronized by the many booklovers who haunt the banks of the Seine in search of old prints and rare editions. Like many booksellers of that time M. Thibault was a lover of books himself, a passionate collector and, besides writing verses after a method of his own, was especially interested in documents on that French Pevolution which he hated.! Thus the poetic in-

11t is interesting to quote here a letter addressed by Anatole France to a man of letters and reproduced in François Carez’s Auteurs Contemporains (p. 82): “ Je vous confie que tout ce qui, dans ce volume (Z Zivre de mon Ami), concerne le petit Nozière, forme un récit exact de mon enfance, sous cette réserve que mon père était non médecin mais libraire sur le quai Voltaire et que les choses domestiques étaient plus étroites et plus humbles chez nous qu’elles ne sont chez un petit médecin de quartier. Le caractère de mon père n’est pas moins conservé dans celui du docteur Nozière. Mon père est devenu un homme instruit, presque savant, à la fin de sa vie.”