but where fault must be found with the Gallic view is that there is not a single phrase in the book to show that Dechartre, represented as in the throes of extreme love, wishes to detach his mistress from her husband. He never suggests that he wants her to live with him always, that he wants her society, her presence, the subtle delight of hearing her walk in the room above. He wants nothing but her body from four to six, twice a week: he is honourable, he is an artist, but he is vile, he is a beast. Big words these, but I have come to think that if we differ at all from the brute it is by the courage with which we face the consequences of our deeds, by delicacies of feeling in which caresses have no place, by something that is more than elegance, that can maintain love when sickness, ugliness appear and æsthetics fall to the ground. There is not in the works of Anatole France a line devoted to love. Whether in _The Red Lily_ or in _The Merrie Tales of Jacques Tournebroche_, or in any of the episodes, “love” is either light and false and lying, or coarse and brutal, or limited by the passing efflorescence of a beauty that must die. He seems, like every other Frenchman I can think of, unable to understand what the Anglo-Saxon means by idealism in love, by that idealism so often made absurd by sentiment, but yet delightful, and distinguished from the impulse of a stag in rut. [6] Relations between husband and wife may have ceased, but this does not touch the argument. And yet, strange to say, Anatole France has written a few stories in which there is a hint of mysticism. _Histoire Comique_ is a story of a haunting; in _Adrienne Buquet_ there is telepathy; in _The Graven Stone_ a fatal influence. There is _Putois_ too, that famous tale of a metaphysical conception in virtue of which a man who was originally a joke ends “like a mythological deity, in becoming actual.” There is _A Daughter of Lilith_, a tale of an immortal and fatal descendant of the pre-Adamites. But those, I feel, are intellectual exercises, and I suspect that they spring from a passing idea of the author: “I think I’ll write a mystical story; it would be rather fun.” The true Anatole France which hides under the sentimental old gentlemen, so cynical and so human, born so cold and to-day so young, is the irreverent, jolly, blasphemous Frenchman of the Middle Ages. I have said this often and quoted much in support because I want to make the English understand what is so difficult for them to understand: the Gaul and his joviality. Still I cannot resist quoting a story from _Penguin Island_, which I am compelled to condense: