In the second story, _The Famished Cat_, where again we have the quite magical picture of Godet-Laterasse, the seedy revolutionary, and of the absurd people concerned with absurd arts at the Famished Cat tavern, we find another incarnation of the future Anatole France: the sculptor Labanne, lazy, ironic, who moralises on art rather as will Choulette in _The Red Lily_, fifteen years later. But it is in _The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_ that Anatole France most clearly indicates his own future. This is just the straggling story of Bonnard, the old professor, who observes the world, interested in women, Benedictine chronicles, the Arc de Triomphe, cats and the love affairs of fourteenth-century queens. The old gentleman watches over the granddaughter of one whom he loved but never married. He behaves quite quixotically, protects her against a schoolmistress who ill treats her; at last he kidnaps her to make her happy, and all ends well in spite of a little tragedy when the girl marries and old Bonnard sells his books to give her a dowry. It is all most incoherent, and one never quite knows what Sylvestre Bonnard’s crime was; it may be the abduction (for old Bonnard, learned in the law of the sixth century, knows nothing of the Code Napoleon), or it may be, which is much more likely, that when he sells his books there are some he cannot bear to part with, even to afford his ward a dowry, and that he goes by night now and then to steal a few of them from the pile. The whole story is full of charm, and Mr Georg Brandes is unjust when he describes it as a simple tale. It is much more than that: it singularly reveals Anatole France himself, for here we have a man aged thirty-six writing as a kindly, rather cynical, faintly ironic old gentleman, fond of the classics and of humanity. Children make him sentimental; he lectures his cat on immortal truth. He says: “I have always preferred the folly of passion to the wisdom of indifference.” And that is true, only one feels that he loves best the folly of passion when it afflicts others. The book ends on a melancholic note, which is perhaps not so melancholic as it seems, for it brings out life passing by, all golden and bloody, as an old, old ship with a sumptuous figurehead, with ragged silken sails, carrying the embalmed corpses of those who first signed on, and their own sons growing up, full of sap, their thick hair streaming in the wind. Already in this book Anatole France is gentle. He is remorseful because “he has made fun of an unhappy man”; he is full of pity for a beggar-boy who will not accept a bit of gingerbread, and says: “He dares not touch it: in virtue of precocious experience he does not believe in happiness.” He states a general theory: the time that God gives each one of us is as a precious fabric which we embroider as well as we may. This man of thirty-six is already old; he has laid his hand on the head of man as if he were a little child, and said: “Creature