It was his mother’s faith and intuition that refused to be severe with him, even when the professor’s report of his school work was “progress nil--conduct bad,” even when his father accepted the verdict of M. Dubois, the professor, that the boy would never accomplish anything in arts or sciences. Then his mother whispered words that he never forgot: “Be a writer, my son; you have brains and you will make the envious hold their tongues.” If his mother was the first vital influence in making her son a world-famous writer, the second was the city of Paris that he loved, studied and photographed on his memory from boyhood to old age. The parks and avenues, the Louvre and the Trocadéro, the sidewalk cafés and the bookshops beyond beautiful Notre-Dame, the vivacious men and women, the workers on the streets and the children in the playgrounds, the stately palaces and the tiny rooms above a publishing shop--all these aspects of Paris form a panoramic picture in his books. In 1868, when Anatole France was an unknown, dreamy, book-browsing young man of twenty-four, there appeared an _Etude_ of Alfred de Vigny which was _his_ tribute to the poet who was “the exemplar of a beautiful life, which gave beautiful work to the world.” The author was known as one of a group of young men who gathered in the rue de Condé to discuss poetry and other forms of writing. Two years later he was serving in the army, trying to forget the shells that dropped in front of him by reading Vergil or playing his flute.[137] In the years that followed he wrote political satires, prefaces, read manuscripts for the publisher Lemerre, collaborated in Larousse’s dictionary and did other “odds and ends” of an editorial kind.