Take the realistic historian now--but you will doubtless know this character better if I show him to you, and the effect he produces upon other temperaments, than if I merely describe him as a type. Among the most entertaining of the reviews that Anatole France contributed to “Le Temps,” in the late 80’s and early 90’s, is one that he devotes to a work “tout à fait solide et puissant” of Louis Bourdeau, “L’Histoire et les Historiens, essai critique”--a critical essay on history considered as an objective science--“in which,” as France remarks, “M. Bourdeau puts works on history in a class with fables and Mother Goose tales. “‘History,’ says M. Bourdeau, ‘is not and cannot be a science.’ The reasons he gives for this have not failed to make an impression on my mind, and perhaps there is a special reason why they should impress me--the sum of which is that I had tried to point out these reasons before he did. I had thrown out suggestions of them flippantly and in a spirit of badinage ten years ago in a little book of mine called the ‘Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard.’ I set no store by them then, but, now that I see they are worth something, I am in haste to claim them. “‘In the first place,’ I said in this little book,--‘In the first place, what is history? History is the written presentation of past events. But what is an event? Is it any fact whatever? No, sir. It is a noteworthy fact. Now, how is the historian to judge whether a fact is noteworthy or not? He judges according to his taste and caprice, follows his own idea, in short, proceeds after the manner of an artist. For facts do not of their own accord divide themselves into historical facts and non-historical facts. Again, a fact is something extremely complex. Does the historian represent facts in all their complexity? No, that is impossible. He will represent them stripped of the greater part of their detail, consequently truncated, mutilated, different from what they were. As to the interrelation of these facts, the less said of that the better. If a so-called historic fact is brought about (which is possible) by one or more non-historic facts--and for that very reason unknown--how can the historian establish a relation between these facts?’ “These, if I am not mistaken, are the fundamental ideas upon which M. Louis Bourdeau rests his right to refuse to history any scientific value.... “Indulgent minds find a way to get along with the treacheries of history. This muse is false, they think, but she no longer deceives us when we have found out that she is deceiving us. Constant doubt shall be our kind of certitude, they say. Prudently, we will go our way from error to error toward a relative kind of truth, for even a lie is some kind of a truth....