Here speaks the old Gaul who feasted on roast meats, drank much hydromel, and as he caressed the long droop of his fair moustache cast a negligent, amiable glance over his white-skinned, blue-eyed, black-haired women. For the Gaul never forgot women; he had anticipated Nietzsche by two thousand years or so, and decided that man was for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. This offends some of us moderns, for the sensuality of the Frenchman, so strong in Anatole France, the sensuality of eating and drinking, of burlesque, of gross stories, some of them concerned with an apartment ignored in the English household since the days of William IV., lies thick over love. It seems a pity to us that, in spite of all his æstheticism, of his sense of beauty, it should look as if Anatole France’s view of love were contained in the famous phrase of Alphonse Karr, or Gustave Droz, I forget which: “Love? A matter of skin.” Well, love is not a matter of skin, at least for us, and one would wish that Anatole France should have found something ethereal, symbolic in the union of man and woman. I cannot explain what I mean: I detest the word “spirituality,” and I hardly know what I miss in this French view of love that Anatole France holds, but I miss it. This view is not exactly: “One woman is as good as another,” but it certainly is: “One woman is as good as another if she is good-looking.” It is all flesh, and æsthetics, which do redeem the flesh, do not redeem it fully. The French heroine, beloved of Anatole France’s heroes, is merely Galatea animate; she is just the beautiful woman descended from her pedestal at the call of her chosen lover. Nothing calls to him save the warm body that once was beautiful marble, and he is content. _The Red Lily_ illustrates that idea. Here we have two people, an unfaithful wife and her lover. We are convinced by the suggestion of extreme passion that these people have reached the apogee of love. It is an unhappy, tormented love, unrolling near the Arno. It develops among a curious society of literary people, is coloured by the usual literary and artistic ideas of Anatole France. Dechartre, the lover, is tormented because his mistress had before him another lover; he is not tormented by the existence of her husband. His distress grows so intense when he begins to suspect, quite wrongly, that she is unfaithful to him with her first lover, produces a strain so great, that their alliance breaks. Well, that is natural enough, for, as Anatole France himself remarks, man is possessive and woman is not, because she has had to get used to sharing, but it is difficult to understand at first sight why Dechartre should be jealous of another lover, and not jealous of a husband. The answer, which is not evident to everybody, is that the act of love is symbolic and that a husband, taken as a social base, is not comparable with a lover taken for love.[6] That is true enough,