I cannot lay too much stress upon that. Anatole France was potentially in 1881 what he is now. It has continually been suggested that, up to 1898 and the revival of the Dreyfus case, Anatole France was a reactionary, a clerical, an anti-democrat; that, somehow, in an unexplained manner, he underwent a change of heart and suddenly turned into a humanitarian socialist; and a few bold folk hinted, when _The Gods are Athirst_ appeared in 1913, that Anatole France, because he painted a dreadful and therefore not over-kind picture of the French Revolution, had reacted again. Briefly: the genius as weathercock. It has even been suggested that Anatole France wrote this reactionary book to make his peace with the respectable classes and to get into the Académie Française: the answer is that Anatole France was a member of that august body seventeen years before the publication of the book. An examination of Anatole France’s early works is vital to this question, notably of _Jocasta_, which has very little to do with the myth, for there is no Œdipus to murder his father and marry his mother; Anatole France is too modern for that. It is a queer, horrible story of the daughter of a shady middleman who, instead of marrying the young doctor she loves, weds a wealthy and sinister old Englishman, whom, to her knowledge, his valet murders. Fearing discovery and haunted by remorse (the Furies), emulating Jocasta, she hangs herself. This story would hardly be worth mentioning save for its fine literary style and its high characterisation of Fellaire, the solemn, kindly, bumptious, sentimental middleman, of Haviland, the dry and methodical collector, if already here Anatole France were not at the age of thirty-five indicating what he would become. For he makes a journalist say in conclusion, after discussing the immortality of the soul and deciding that it is really a very complicated question: “Fortunately the Almighty is not a subject for an up-to-date par.”