All this feeling is in _The Revolt of the Angels_, the most remarkable of Anatole France’s theological books, as _Penguin Island_ is his principal political book. It is an amusing story, this idea that the angels, as knowledge and thought spread among them, should one by one desert the heavenly choir, come to earth to live among men, to love them, and attempt to overthrow Him who has stood in the way of every science and of every art. The book is brilliant because it so casually intermingles the actual with the fantastic. The angels who descend to earth and turn into men become music masters (obviously), conspirators, commercial travellers, and here below prepare the spiritual revolution. The career of the principal angel, Arcade, is exceedingly amusing, for he ravages by night the theological libraries, being bent on gaining an education which was not given him in Paradise. And there is a fair amount of the most incongruous, but almost engaging, indecency. It would be too much to describe the incident exactly here, but I think I may say that Arcade, who is the guardian angel of a young man called Maurice, appears in the latter’s bedroom at a moment ... well, at an inopportune moment. And when at last he has convinced Maurice that he really is an angel, Maurice says something which could be said only by a Parisian: “You may be an angel, but you are not a man of the world.” He is wrong, for a little later Arcade, in the very same room, demonstrates to the lady whose reputation he compromised by his sudden materialisation, that angels are close relatives of men.