and withal more young, and incomparably more precious: the beauty of what is beautiful in human emotion, that this story will live.”[140] After 1886 the weekly “Causerie,” which Anatole France contributed _On Life and Letters_ to the Paris _Temps_, increased his literary fame and established his rank as critic. Here appeared such diverse, stimulating judgments upon writers of the day, as Maupassant and Dumas, Balzac and Marie Bashkirtseff, François Coppée (compared with Sully-Prudhomme and Frédéric Plessis), Renan and George Sand; among topics of more general interest were “Prince Bismarck,” “The Young Girl of the Past and the Young Girl of the Present,” and “Virtue in France.” Four volumes of these essays, _On Life and Letters_, have been translated into English. It was nine years after _The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_ that another book appeared to rivet attention upon this industrious, progressive author. He once declared that he wrote the earlier book “to please the public” but that he wrote the later, _Thaïs_, to please himself. In development of skill in fiction it is superior; it has been well described as “an epic of eternal struggle between the spirit and the senses.”[141] The author had passed through some emotional crises since he wrote his earlier books of reminiscence, notably _My Friend’s Book_, with its reflections of his happy home life and the whimsical domestic discussions between the wife of his youth and himself about their daughter, Susanne. He had traveled and become imbued with sensuous beauty of southern lands; he had been annoyed, to the verge of anger, by reactionists, represented in _Thaïs_ by Palaemon, “who would banish joy and beauty from the world.” He made Nicias, often a skeptic in his surface sentiments, his spokesman. The poet and the realist are commingled in this tale of disillusionment, even as they are found in the later, more vehement books of the novelist-satirist, _The Red Lily_, _At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque_ (considered by many critics his masterwork), _The Amethyst Ring_, _The Gods Are Athirst_, _The Wicker-Work Woman_, _Penguin Island_, _The Revolt of the Angels_, and shorter stories like _Crainquebille_, _The White Stone_, _The Seven Wives of Bluebeard_, and _Tales from a Mother of Pearl Casket._