Constable, the English landscapist, said that a good thing can’t be done twice. Anatole France has demonstrated the contrary in his latest, let us hope not his last book, Le Petit Pierre, another series of exquisite notations of childhood. His delightful Livre de Mon Ami gave us glimpses of his early days. Fascinating are the chapters devoted to Pierre and Suzanne in this memoir. The tenderness of M. France, and his power of summoning up the wonder and awe of our youth, may be seen in Abeille; the development of the lad is followed in Pierre Nozière. A portrait of the young Anatole reveals his excessive sensibility. His head was large, the brow too broad for the feminine chin, though the long nose and firm mouth contradict possible weakness in the lower part of the face. It was in the eyes that the future of the child might have been read--they were lustrous, in shape beautiful, with a fulness that argued eloquence and imagination. Such eyes were possessed by the boy Charles Dickens. France has told us that he was a strange child, whose chief ambition was to be a saint, a second St. Simon Stylites, and after that thrilling experience to write a history of France in fifty volumes! In Le Petit Pierre his memory for the important little events of a child’s existence is unusual; evidently nothing has been invented, all happened. Through the haze of the immemorial years there now and then sharply shines some significant incident, some old wives’ tales, a portrait of an elderly contemporary--like the Balzacian Uncle Hyacinthe or the incomparable evocation of the beloved servant Mélanie--a dog, like Caire, the truant parrot, the boy chimney-sweep, and the sweet smile of Pierre’s mother, who seems to be every one’s mother so admirably generalized is the type--what a magician is this writer! Told with naïveté and verve, we feel in every page of Le Petit Pierre the charm of personality.