It was just what the Academy of Richelieu loved, and they crowned it. The young writer was taken up by an exquisite French lady, who became his mistress, and set up a salon for him, and helped him to meet all the editors and critics--which is how you make fame and fortune in Paris, and sometimes in America, I am told. This Frenchman was clever and witty, sensual, cynical, but not too much so for his elegant free-thinking tradition. He wrote other novels and a great quantity of miscellaneous writings, and in 1896, at the age of fifty-two, his labors were rewarded by the great French honor, he became one of Richelieu’s forty Immortals. In the ordinary course of events there was nothing more for him to do, save to sink back in his comfortable arm-chair and listen to the plaudits of Paris. But a strange and alarming thing happened. The struggle over the Dreyfus case arose, and Anatole France leaped into the arena, joining Zola, whom he had previously denounced as a beastly writer. Here was something absolutely without precedent--that an Academician should turn into a Socialist, and take to attending meetings of workingmen, and addressing to them remarks unfit to be quoted in respectable newspapers. Worse even yet, he, the pride and glory of art-for-art’s-sake culture, took to putting radical propaganda into novels! They had let him in among the Immortals, and there was no way to get him out; so here was one of the pillars of literary authority, portraying his country as an island of penguins, and the pillars of his church and state as grotesque, wingless birds, dressing themselves in frock-coats and silk hats and hopping about upon obscene errands. Have a glimpse of them: “Do you see, my son,” he exclaimed, “that madman who with his teeth is biting the nose of the adversary he has overthrown, and that other one who is pounding a woman’s head with a huge stone?” “I see them,” said Bulloch. “They are creating law; they are founding property; they are establishing the principles of civilization, the basis of society, the foundations of the State.” “How is that?” asked old Maël. “By setting bounds to their fields. That is the origin of all government. Your penguins, O Master, are performing the most august of functions. Throughout the ages their work will be consecrated by lawyers, and magistrates will confirm it.”