Fresh memories of the Dreyfus Case were awakened by his poignant satire in _Penguin Island_ with its elements of burlesque. The author’s historical research, which bore ripe fruits in _The Life of Jeanne d’Arc_, is revealed in _The Gods Are Athirst_, with sardonic wit and dramatic passages between Evariste, his mother, and his mistress. Julie, his beautiful sister, appeals to the reader’s sympathy. The ex-farmer of taxes, whose livelihood is now made by cutting out cardboard dancing dolls, is a haunting character. He voices, perhaps, the author’s attitude to life at this period--that is was full of disillusionment and defeats but was not worth the cost of one’s anxiety to the point of despair. In some of these satiric tales of life, notably _The Revolt of the Angels_ when they come to Paris and behold certain social conditions, there are passages so naturalistic that they offend tastes of less “sophisticated” readers. Some of the books by Anatole France were tabooed in libraries before the award of the Nobel prize; the year after that was given, all of his works, without due discrimination, were “placed on the Index” by the Roman Curia because of excess of utterances that were communistic and anti-clerical in tone. When he went to Stockholm to receive this prize in person he was reported to have said, regarding the Treaty of Versailles, “the most horrible of wars was followed by a treaty which was not a treaty of peace but a prolongation of the war. The downfall of Europe is inevitable unless at long last the spirit of reason is imported into its councils.”[142]