“I love life which is earthy life, life as it is, this dog’s life. I love it brutal, vile and gross. I love it sordid, dirty, spoilt; I love it stupid, imbecile and cruel; I love it in its obscenity, in its infamy, with its violence, its stinks, its corruptions and its infections.... On Sundays I go among the people, I mix with the crowd that flows in the streets, I plunge into groups of men, women and children, which form round street-singers or before the booths at fairs; I touch dirty coats and greasy bodices; I breathe the strong, warm scents of sweat, of hair, of breaths. In this well of life I feel further from death. Death: nothingness, that is an infinite naught, and this naught envelops us. Thence we come and hence we go; we are always two nothingnesses as a shell upon the waters. Nothingness is the impossible and the assured; it is inconceivable and it is.” A quotation such as this, taken in conjunction with the earlier quotation from the preface of _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, outlines the man within the writer, and I need not labour that the faith of Anatole France is the faith of Epicurus, of Petronius Arbiter, of Villon, of Rabelais, of Fielding. The whole basis of him is sensuality, and I hate to say this in a country such as England, where the maypole has been cut down and Calvinism reigns supreme, where sensuality, that once whispered melodies into the ears of Pan and hung garlands about the birch-trees, has been hated and hunted until it had to take refuge in the dirty talk of the public-house. The sensuality of Anatole France is like sap arising in the trees, like the moth circling about the candle; it is joyous, frank, unashamed; the world and all that is in it is its toy. In this country it has become disgusting to like good food; you must not even talk of food, it is not done (and the result is English food, the laughing-stock of the universe). But listen to Anatole France on food in _Histoire Comique_: “The Castelnaudary stew contains the preserved thighs of geese, whitened beans, bacon and a little sausage. To be good it must have been cooked lengthily upon a gentle fire. Clémence’s stew has been cooking for twenty years. She puts into the pan sometimes goose or bacon, sometimes sausage or beans, but it is always the same stew. The foundation endures; this ancient and precious foundation gives the stew the quality that in the pictures of old Venetian masters you find in the women’s amber flesh....”