Anatole France

"People in rags deserve to be hated, and also those who carry baskets on their heads or roll casks. Children who run about the streets, chasing each other and screaming, are hateful too."

"I love my master because he is powerful and terrible."

"An action for which one is thrashed is a bad action. An action for which one is caressed or given something to eat is a good action."

"Prayer. – O Bergeret, my master, god of carnage, I adore thee. Praised be thou when thou art terrible, praised when thou art gracious! I crawl to thy feet, I lick thy hands. Great art thou and beautiful when, seated at thy spread table, thou devourest quantities of food. Great art thou and beautiful when, bringing forth tire from a little chip of wood, thou changest night into day. Keep me, I pray thee, in thy house, and keep out every other dog!" This is a parody of human religion, good-natured and yet trenchant.

When, in his turn, Monsieur Bergeret addresses the dog, he addresses in him the whole undeveloped portion of the human race.

"You too, poor little black being, so feeble in spite of your sharp teeth and your gaping jaws, you too adore outward appearances, and your worship is the ancient worship of injustice. You too allow yourself to be seduced by lies. You too have race hatreds.

"I know that there is an obscure goodness in you, the goodness of Caliban. You are pious; you have your theology and your morality. And you know no better. You guard the house, guard it even against those who are its protection and ornament. That workman whom you tried to drive away has, plain man though he be, most admirable ideas. You would not listen to him.

"Your hairy ears hear, not him who speaks best, but him who shouts loudest. And fear, that natural fear which was the counsellor of your ancestors and mine when they were cave-dwellers, the fear which created gods and crimes, makes you the enemy of the unfortunate and deprives you of pity."

The irony gains in power by being veiled in the innocence of the dog. The irony in France's writings is generally veiled in some such manner. In Monsieur Bergeret à Paris, for instance, the standpoint of the author's opponents is presented to us in two chapters which are read aloud by Monsieur Bergeret from a supposed work of the year 1538, in which France, with extraordinary skill, has imitated the language, style, and reasoning of the Trublions, the Nationalists of that age.

Just as something in France's intellectual qualities generally, reminds us of Voltaire as the narrator, so something in his principal characters and in the spirit of his novels recalls Candide. Candide, too, was naïve. France has read Voltaire again and again, and assimilated much of him. How often, for instance, does the story of Cosru's widow in Zadig crop up in France's pages! A Voltairean sentence such as: "The belief in the immortality of the soul is spreading in Africa along with cotton goods," sounds as if it might have been written by France. The naïveté of the modern writer is certainly the more genuine, though in greatness as an author he, of course, falls far short of his predecessor.

The four volumes of the Histoire Contemporaine, the last two of which, with their witty tirades oil the Dreyfus affair, were of no small assistance to the opponents of the Nationalists, are, though of unequal value, a very remarkable product of ripe experience and Olympian superiority. The principal character, the gentle and wise Monsieur Bergeret, unfortunate as a husband, fortunate in that he was able to obtain a divorce, is, as a type, in no respect inferior to the personages in whom other great French authors have embodied themselves. He is a worthy brother of Alceste, Figaro, and Mercadet.

More artistically perfect than this lengthy four-volume novel are the short modern stories published under the title of Crainquebille. The first of these, which gives its name to the book, is told placidly, simply, cuttingly, bitterly. The plot is so simple that it can be compressed into a few lines. A decent old man, a street vendor of vegetables, has stopped with his barrow in front of a shop in a very busy thoroughfare. He is waiting for payment for some leeks which he has sold. A policeman orders him to move on, and, heedless of the old man's muttered, "I'm waiting for my money," repeats the order twice in the course of a few moments, and then, enraged by Crainquebille's "resistance to authority," arrests him and accuses him before the magistrate of having made use of the insulting expression in which the common people give vent to their dislike of the police – a thing which the old man has certainly not done. The magistrate, who places more faith in the assertion of the policeman than in the denial of the poor man, sentences the latter to a fortnight's imprisonment and a fine of fifty francs.

When he comes out of prison Crainquebille finds that his customers have deserted him for another hawker, and will have nothing more to do with him because of his disgrace. He sinks deeper and deeper into poverty and misery, until at last he feels that the only way left him to provide himself with a shelter is to rush at a policeman shouting the offensive expression which he had before been unjustly accused of using. This policeman, however, leaning stoically against a lamp-post in pouring rain, despises the insult, and takes not the slightest notice of it, so that the poor man's last resort fails him.

Crainquebille is painfully touching; the next little story, Putois, is both witty and pregnant with meaning.

"Lucien," says Zoé to her brother, Monsieur Bergeret, "you remember Putois?"

"I should say so. Of all the familiar figures of our childhood, no other is still so vividly before my eyes. He had a peculiarly high head."

"And low forehead," adds Mademoiselle Zoé.

And now brother and sister intone in turn, with perfect seriousness, as if they were giving a description for legal purposes: "Low forehead," "Wall-eyed," "Unable to look one in the face," "Wrinkles at the corner of the eyes," "Thin," "Rather round-shouldered," "Feeble in appearance, but in reality extraordinarily strong – able to bend a five-franc piece between his first finger and thumb," "Thumb enormous," and many other particulars.

Monsieur Bergeret's daughter Pauline asks: "What was Putois?" and is told that he was a gardener, the son of respectable country people; that he started a nursery at Saint-Omer, but, proving unsuccessful with it, had to take work where he could find it; and that his character was none of the best. When Monsieur Bergeret the elder missed anything from his writing-table he always said: "I have a suspicion that Putois has been here."

"Is that all?" asks Pauline.

"No, my child, that is not all. The remarkable thing about Putois was that, well as we knew him, he nevertheless…"

"Did not exist," said Zoé.

"How can you say such a thing!" cried Monsieur Bergeret. "Are you prepared to answer for your words, Zoé? Have you sufficiently reflected upon the conditions of existence and all the modes of being?"

Then Monsieur Bergeret explains to his daughter that Putois was born as a full-grown man in the days when he himself and his sister were boy and girl. The Bergerets inhabited a small house in Saint-Omer, where they led a quiet, retired life, until they were discovered by a rich old grand-aunt of Madame's, Madame Cornouiller, the owner of a small property in the neighbourhood, who took advantage of the relationship to insist upon their dining with her every Sunday – a Sunday family dinner being, according to her, imperative among people of their position.

As Monsieur Bergeret was bored to death by these entertainments, he in time rebelled, refused to go, and left it to his wife to invent excuses for declining the invitations. And thus it came about that the usually truthful woman said one day: "We cannot come this week. I expect the gardener on Sunday." Putois had received his first attribute.

Glancing at the scrap of ground belonging to the house, Madame Cornouiller asked with astonishment if this were the garden in which he was to work, and on being told that it was, very naturally remarked that he might just as well do it on a weekday. This speech in its turn necessitated the reply that the man could only come on Sunday, as he was occupied all the week. Second qualification.

"What is your gardener's name, my dear?" "Putois" replied Madame Bergeret without hesitation. From the moment in which he received a name, Putois began to lead a kind of existence. When the old lady inquired where he lived, he necessarily became a species of itinerant workman – a vagrant, in fact. So now to existence had been added status.

When Madame Cornouiller decided that he should work for her too, he immediately proved to be undiscoverable. She made inquiries about him of all and sundry, to find that most of those she asked thought they had seen him, and others knew him, but were not certain where he was at the moment. The tax-collector was able to say with certainty that Putois had chopped firewood for him between the 19th and 23rd of October of the comet year.

The day came, however, when Madame Cornouiller was able to tell the Bergerets that she herself had seen him – a man of fifty or thereabouts, thin, round-shouldered, with a dirty blouse and the general appearance of a tramp. She had called "Putois!" in a loud voice, and he had turned round.

From this day onward Putois became ever more and more of a reality. Three melons were stolen from Madame Cornouiller. She suspected Putois. The police, too, believed him to be the culprit, and searched the neighbourhood for him. The Journal de Saint-Omer published a description of him, from which it appeared that he had the face of a habitual criminal. Ere long there was another theft on Madame Cornouiller's premises; three small silver spoons were stolen. She recognised Putois's handiwork. Henceforward he was the terror of the town.

When Gudule, her cook, was discovered to be enceinte, Madame Cornouiller jumped to the conclusion that she had been seduced by Putois, and was confirmed in her belief by the fact of the woman's weeping and refusing to answer her questions. As Gudule was ugly and bearded, the story occasioned much amusement, and in popular fancy Putois became a perfect satyr. Another servant in the town and a poor hump-backed girl being brought to bed that same year with children whose paternity was mysteriously concealed, Putois attained the reputation of a veritable monster.

Children caught glimpses of him everywhere. They saw him passing the door in the dusk, or climbing the garden wall; it was he who had inked the faces of Zoé's dolls; he howled at nights with the dogs and caterwauled with the cats; he stole into the bedroom; he became something between a hobgoblin, a brownie, and the dustman who closes little children's eyes. Monsieur Bergeret was interested in him as typical of all human beliefs; and, since all Saint-Omer was firmly convinced of Putois' existence, he, as a good citizen, would do nothing to shake their belief.

As to Madame Bergeret, she reproached herself sometimes for the birth of Putois; but, after all, she had done nothing worse than Shakespeare when he created Caliban. Nevertheless she turned quite pale one day when the maid came in and said that a man like a country labourer wished to speak to madame. "Did he give his name?" "Yes – Putois." "What?" "Putois, madame. He is waiting in the kitchen." "What does he want?" "He will tell no one but yourself, madame." "Go and ask him again." When the maid returned to the kitchen Putois was gone. But from that day Madame Bergeret herself began to have a kind of belief in his existence.

The story is both clever and of deep significance, it turns on the question of what an imaginary existence is. Putois' generation is the generation of a myth, and he exerts the influence which mythical characters do. No one can deny the rule of mythical beings over the minds of men, their influence on human souls. Gods and goddesses, spirits and saints, have inspired enthusiasm and terror, have had their altars, have counselled crimes, have, originated customs and laws. Satyrs and Silenuses have occupied the human imagination, have set chisels and brushes to work century after century. The Devil has his history, extending back for thousands of years – has been terrible, witty, foolish, cruel; has demanded human sacrifices; and has not only been worshipped by magicians and witches, but has, up to our own days, had his priests. France, however, has not the Devil alone in his mind; his thoughts range higher.

And he not only throws light in a bantering way on the formation of a myth, but also, and still more vividly, upon human verdicts. When Madame Cornouiller suspects Madame Bergeret of wishing to keep the vagrant gardener for herself, of not allowing other people to have any share in Putois, the writer remarks, as it were with a smile, that many historical conclusions which are accepted by every one are as well founded as this conclusion of Madame Cornouillers. Here, as elsewhere, France asserts that it is foolish to believe in the just judgment of posterity.

He has always thought it strange that Madame Roland should have appealed to "impartial posterity," without reflecting that if her contemporaries, who guillotined her, were cruel apes, there was every probability of their descendants being the same.

The world's history is the world's verdict, wrote Schiller. He is a naïve man who believes this. Posterity is just only to this extent, that the questions are of indifference to it; and as it is with the greatest difficulty that it can examine the dead, and as, moreover, it is itself not an impersonal thing, but an aggregate of more or less prejudiced human beings, the verdict takes shape accordingly. Historic justice is a Putois.

Fame is a Putois, an imaginary, impalpable being, that is pursued by thousands, and that melts into nothing just when it should display itself in full vigour – namely, after their death.

Everywhere we have imaginary, artificial existence, proclaimed to be real, and accepted as such. It is not at all necessary to confine ourselves to religion, where it is only too easy to discover Putois, whose huge shadow darkens theology in its entirety. Let us think of the illusions in politics, of the part played by titles in social life. Or let us remember the place occupied by imaginary existences in our own emotional life. Suppose that we could transfer to canvas the image of the beloved one which forms itself in the imagination of the lover at the moment when he sees all her supposed perfections, and afterwards place alongside of it the image of her which remains when love has evaporated and he has stripped her, one by one, of all the qualities which enchanted him – the description of the first picture would not seem less unreal than the description of Putois.

The reader who muses over the little story will feel how many ideas it sets in motion, and will, like the inhabitants of Saint-Omer, find traces of Putois everywhere.

The fault in most historical descriptions is that the pictures of the past are distorted in accordance with the significance which they have acquired for a later age. Gobineau makes Michael Angelo talk of Raphael as people did in the nineteenth century when they named them together. Wilde makes John the Baptist speak as he does in the Gospels, which were written, with an aim which led to distortion, long after his death. Wherever in modern poetry or art the figure of Jesus is treated, no matter in what spirit – let it be by Paul Heyse, by Sadakichi Hartmann the Japanese, or Edward Söderberg the Dane – He is the principal figure of His day, occupying the thoughts of all.

France, in his story, Judæas Procurator, has, in an extremely clever manner, indicated the place occupied by Jesus in the consciousness of a contemporary Roman. To any one who can read, the fact that the life and death of Jesus interested only a little band of humble people in Jerusalem, is sufficiently established by the circumstance that Josephus, who knows everything that happens in the Palestine of his day, does not so much as name Him. The man who argues that such an event as the Crucifixion must have made some impression forgets what a common and unheeded incident a crucifixion was in troublous times. During the Jewish war of the year 70, in the course of which 13.000 Jews were killed at Skythopolis, 50.000 in Alexandria, 40,000 at Jotapata – 1,100,000 in all – Titus crucified on an average 500 Jews every day. When, impelled by hunger, they crept under the walls of Jerusalem, they were captured, tortured, and crucified. At last there was no more wood for crosses left in Palestine.

As his principal character, France has taken the Titus Ælius Lamia to whom the seventeenth ode of Horace's Third Book is addressed – a gay young Roman who, according to France, is banished by Tiberius for a flagrant love-affair with a consuls wife, goes to Palestine, and meets with a friendly reception in the house of Pontius Pilate. Forty years pass; Ælius Lamia has long been back in Italy; he is at Baiæ, taking the baths, and is sitting one day by a path upon a height reading Lucretius, when, in the occupant of a litter borne past by slaves, it seems to him that he recognises his old host, Pilate.

And it really is Pilate, who has come, accompanied by his eldest daughter, now a widow, to take the baths. They talk of old days – of all the trouble Pontius had with those wretched Jews, who refused to do homage to the image of the Emperor on the banners, and allowed themselves to be flogged to death rather than worship it. They continually came to him, too, demanding a sentence of death on some unfortunate creature whose crime he was unable to discover, and who appeared to him to be as mad as his accusers. Lamia declares that Pontius lacked appreciation of the Jews' good qualities, but confesses that his own predilection was in favour of the Jewesses. He recalls an evening on which he saw one of them dancing with uplifted arms to the clang of cymbals, on a ragged carpet in a miserably lighted, wretched drinking-booth. The dance was barbaric, the voice hoarse, but in the motion of the limbs there was sorcery, and the eyes were Cleopatra's. She had heavy red hair, this girl, whose charms enticed the young Roman to follow her everywhere. "But she ran away from me," he continued, when the young lay preacher and miracle-worker came from Galilee to Jerusalem. She became inseparable from him, and joined the little band of men and women who were always with him. "You remember him, of course?" "No," replies Pilate. "His name was Jesus, I think; he was from Nazareth" "I do not remember him," reaffirms Pilate. "You were obliged to have him crucified." "Jesus – " mutters Pilate, "from Nazareth – I have no recollection of it."

Here we have a characteristic example of Frances manner of producing his effects, and of his art in its profound truth.

So far is he from seeing Pilate's connection with Jesus in the light of later times that he represents him as completely forgetting the whole occurrence, which was an everyday one to him – whilst Lamia only remembers it because of Magdalene.

France has drawn Magdalene again in the tale of Læta Acilia, one of those composing the volume entitled Balthasar. Here he represents her as driven from Judæa, and arriving by ship at Marseilles, where she tries to convert her protectress, a Roman knight's wife. The Roman lady desires a child. Magdalene promises to pray for her. The next time she comes to the house Læta Acilia is pregnant. And now Magdalene tells her that she herself was a sinner when she first beheld the fairest of men, the Son of Man; that He drove seven devils out of her; and that she fell on her knees before Him in the house of one Simon and poured precious ointment from an alabaster box over His sacred feet. She repeats the words which the gentle Rabbi uttered in her defence when His disciples, with coarse taunts, would have driven her away. Since then she has lived in the shadow of the Master as in a new Paradise. And to her it was that He appeared first after His resurrection.

It seems to the Roman lady that Magdalene is endeavouring to impart to her a distaste for the pleasures of her placid life. Until now she has had no idea of there being any other happiness in the world except that which she knows.

"I have no desire to know your God. You have loved him too supremely. To please him one is to fall at his feet with unloosened hair! That is no posture for the wife of a Roman knight. Go, Jewess! Your God can never be mine. I have not lived the life of a sinner, and I have not been possessed with seven devils. I have not wandered in ways of error; I am a woman deserving of respect. Go!"

What attracts France in these characters is the contrast between the emotional life of the two women, between the religiously erotic rapture of the Asiatic and the tradition-sanctioned conjugal love of the Roman matron.