The reason probably is that it is not enough to understand Anatole France; one also has to understand the French, the gay, sensual, garrulous French of the Middle Ages, the gay, sensual, courteous French of the seventeenth century, the gay, sensual, cynical French of Voltairian times, and the sensual, cynical French of to-day. Anatole France is all these, a sort of historical congress of French epochs, a retrospective exhibition of French mentalities. That perhaps explains the confusion which reigns in the minds of a great many people as to his alleged evolution from reaction to red socialism, a confusion so great that it seems to have touched even Mr Georg Brandes. It is not wonderful that Anatole France should be so representative, for he is a provincial by extraction, a Parisian by birth and environment. The whole of his biography is revealed in his books, so it is enough to say that he was born in 1844, in the Quarter (that was inevitable), that he grew up in his father’s old bookshop near the quays of the Seine, listening, as he grew up, sometimes to the talk of republicans, for those were the days of the Second Empire, much more often to that of elegant half-worldling abbés and aristocrats, for his father was a pronounced Royalist and Catholic, as was also his mother.... Old books, good talk, and the Seine lazily flowing under the plane-trees before there were steam trams. It is all very like Anatole France, like the four volumes of _Contemporary History_ where the bookshop is the centre, like _Pierre Nozière_ and _My Friend’s Book_. Then little France (whose real name is Thibault) went to the Collège Stanislas to be brought up as a good Royalist child. But he did not do particularly well there, thus bearing out the legend of the prize boy. Notably he loafed. Anatole France in life has always loafed, which is natural enough in one who was born near bridges. Who would not loaf who has a flowing river to watch? It might be said that Anatole France has loafed through thirty-five volumes. As he grew up he accomplished desultory tasks, he taught, he wrote articles for the papers; in 1868 he published his study of Alfred de Vigny; in 1873 and 1876 he gave us two volumes of verse, _Poèmes Dorés_ and _Les Noces Corinthiennes_. Not very startling or attractive verse; however deep Anatole France’s poetic feeling, he has never approached greatness as a poet, perhaps because he was always too calm, too detached, because so seldom did his eye in fine frenzy roll. Only when at last, in 1879, he published his first work of creative prose, two longish stories, _Jocasta_ and _The Famished Cat_, followed, two years later, by _The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_, and in 1882 by _Les Désirs de Jean Servien_,[2] was born the Anatole France we know to-day. [2] The title is given in English if the work has been translated, in French if it has not.