But apart from scenes where angels button up the boots of ladies, which is very clever of them, considering how little practice they can have had, there is in the book to a much greater extent than in _Thais_ a passionate plea for the intellectual side of paganism, the one embodying all that is young and all that is enlightened, embodying the joys which the god of the Jews endeavoured to drive out of the domain of man. And there is more than one picture of Satan as the god of grace (presumably precipitated into hell on account of his advanced ideas), of Satan loving man. There is picture after picture of the Son of the Morning who once was Pan. In the end the angels do not revolt, for Satan in his dream realises that if he overthrows God and establishes himself as another god, he will only become as his predecessor, harsh, dogmatic, intolerant, greedy of praise, hostile to anything which might rear up in the mind of the people the idea of a new god. Satan will not reign, and he sums up: “What matters if man is no longer subject to Ialdabaoth, if the spirit of Ialdabaoth is still in them? if like him they are jealous, violent, quarrelsome, greedy, inimical to the arts and to beauty? what matters if they have rejected the ferocious demon if they listen not to the friendly demons who teach all truths, to Dionysus, Apollo and the muses? As for us, celestial spirits, sublime demons, we have destroyed Ialdabaoth, our tyrant, if we have destroyed in ourselves ignorance and fear.” IV HISTORIAN AND POLITICIAN Though deeply interested in the past, Anatole France has written singularly little pure history. His vision being universal, most of his critical work is informed with historic feeling, but in spite of his love of ancient chronicles, in spite of knowledge which might shame the College of Heralds and the Record Office put together, he has preferred to use history as raw material for romance. He has been right, in a way, for most historians have used romance as the raw material of history and made of it, with a few exceptions, such as Green, Gibbon, Michelet, Mommsen, an unreadable, unfinished product. Anatole France knows that, and possibly he has hesitated to write history because he had not the details he needed to write it as he wished; those details were the history of the people, the real history, the ploughman’s menu, and what the merchant said to his wife about Mr Pitt before they fell asleep; battles and dates make him smile. He expresses this very well in the preface to _The Life of Joan of Arc_. “To discern the future one must consider not the enterprises of the great but the confused movements of the labouring masses.”