And he is fair. He is not fair like Byron, who hated most people and disliked the others, but because he can see oddity and occasionally beastliness in the people of whom he approves. He is for the Jews in this Dreyfus quarrel, but that does not make him anti-Christian; he is as impartial in his attacks as a mosquito. Indeed a great many Jews wish they had been saved from their friend, for pictures such as that of Madame Worms-Clavelin and her husband, of Madame de Bonmont, that most Christian of Jewesses, anxious to forget the tent of hides, remembering in the most sacred (and even most amorous) moments that there is such a thing as a Stock Exchange, are not always kind. But, kind or unkind, the satire is never laid on thickly. Not once does Anatole France suggest that Mademoiselle Deniseau is a sham prophetess: no, that would be clumsy; she merely cannot give the logarithm of nine.... In those four books modern French society stands forth quite stark, with a rather decayed charm, a naïveté born from an excess of complexity. Anatole France strips it of all its gewgaws, patriotism, faith, morality: of all its little affectations; ... and then, having exposed it, he consents to love it because his satire rests on his philosophy. That philosophy, with which I deal further on, is enunciated in every volume by the nice old gentlemen who embody him, Bonnard, Bergeret and the others: irony and pity; despise man but love him, see his weakness and yet hope; he may not be immortal, yet he is eternal, indestructible as all matter; and though he be no more than a mite in cheese yet he is the expression of life, the soul of beauty, the one thing in the world which is holy. For Anatole France is sweet and pitiful. All through his work we feel that, and in none so much as in a little story, _Crainquebille_. This is the simple tale of an old hawker who was run in for not moving on, just because he was waiting for sixpence owed to him for vegetables. The policeman trumped up against him a charge of having shouted “Down with the Peelers!” When he comes out of gaol Crainquebille is ostracised; that makes him quarrelsome; then, having no friends, he drinks; becoming drunken, he loses his customers and sinks deeper and deeper into poverty. And the terrible indictment of the law that makes criminals by listening to the strong and flouting the poor, ends on the picture of old Crainquebille, forlorn, degraded and starving, going up to a policeman and shouting: “Down with the Peelers!” so as to get a night’s lodging in the cells. But, irony of ironies, this policeman shrugs his shoulders, and walks away.