It might be said that Anatole France was _born_ into the inheritance of books in 1844, for his father, François Noël Thibault, was a bookseller of repute throughout Paris and its environs. Son of a shoemaker in Anjou, this elder Thibault had taught himself to read and write while he had been in military service as a young man. At his bookshops in the Quai Malaquais and Quai Voltaire gathered scholars and authors, iconoclasts in politics and letters and religion; the shopkeeper was a Royalist and a fervent Catholic. In the character of Dr. Nozière, in _Pierre Nozière_, his son “has taken away the bookshop,” as he confesses, but he has revealed many traits of his father’s character. In the Epilogue to _The Bloom of Life_ are other memories that may be “capricious,” as he admits, but are none the less true “records” of his childhood. Here his father’s lack of business instincts is suggested as elsewhere--he would often prefer to _read_ his books rather than to _sell_ them. The influence of these boyhood days in this bookshop, with contact directly with thinkers and writers, with wits and critics, must have been vital and permeating in the later development of Anatole France as psychologist and stylist. In his last hours, we are told, this famous writer who had been “a genial mocker at life,” an epicurean and scoffer, a scholar of wide culture, called upon the name of his mother. She had been the first, and one of the most significant factors in his life-development. There are passages of less deferential tone about her in _Anatole France Himself: a Boswellian Record_, by Jean-Jacques Brousson (Philadelphia, 1925). She was of good Flemish family, with unfailing _esprit_ and optimism, practical and able to “attend to the gears of household management that got loose sometimes,” with an absent-minded father. She was, however, a rare story-teller and devoted to her boy with the unusual gifts which she alone, in his boyhood, could foresee and encourage. How happy he was at home is revealed in many chapters of his books--not alone those of acknowledged reminiscence but others like _The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_ and an occasional essay _On Life and Letters_. By contrast with the joys of home--the delicate table linen and decanters, the “tranquil faces,” the easy talk--he disliked the classrooms and the restrictions of school life, declaring, “Ah, Home is a famous school.” A sense of humor and a keen interest in humanity made the life at the Collège Stanislas endurable but he loved solitude; he resented the gibes of instructors and students, and he stole away to the quays along the Seine at the hour of noon recess to eat his luncheon--or to forget to eat it--and returned too late for the afternoon session and his chance to recite.