Anatole at Ease*

Careless Words Trickle Down an Old Beard

The Book. A figure beturbaned with a flowered silk handkerchief, swaddled in layers of woolly night-garments, growls among the bolsters of a four-poster like Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother. Josephine, the grumbling cook and masterful mistress, who dominates the progress of physical events in the Villa Said, draws the blinds and scoffs her master's self-pity for a feverish night. He swallows his chocolate, demolishes brioches. To this mistress, later his wife, Anatole France is a dithering old goat-beard, incapable of putting on his own underdrawers.

Mail is dumped on the great man's coverlet. He rummages, hurls books to the floor. "To the bath! To the bath!" (An enormous tub is filled thus almost weekly; a secondhand bookseller empties it, giving 50 francs a bath, verse or prose.) Letters all go into the fire. No, here is one from a madwoman, addressed in blue, crimson, green inks. "She begs me to save my soul, poor crazed thing!"

The last touch of dressing is to choose a cap from the basket Josephine produces. M. France holds them out on his fist, one by one--papal bonnets, velvet skull-pieces, pagoda-caps, purple choir-wafers, mandarin hats. He fits on one in red-current Jouy cloth. The day begins.

He is working at his Joan of Arc with a new secretary. Josephine brings the notes and manuscript, bundled in a sheet. Safety-pins undone, a torrent pours on the carpet--notebooks, envelopes, visiting cards, tradesmen's bills, timetables. "Burn it, tear it to pieces, blue pencil it. I don't want to look at it. . . . The first thing to do, I think, must be to divide up the work." In a score of inkwells scattered about, there is no ink. Josephine fills them with coffee. The pens scratch and splutter. Joan of Arc is postponed.

This cluttered journal proceeds with all the ingenious disorder of its subject's existence. Had he been a woman, the title could have read: "Anatole France with her hair down"-- bodily hair, mental and spiritual. He asks the secretary, in a study crammed with sacred art-works and in the tone one uses to inquire after another's liver: "Have you been liberated from religious beliefs ?" There are appalling dinner conversations, loquacious walks about Paris, disconnected imperies, prodigious exclamations on a thousand passing matters--the necessity for affection, archaeological finds, the shrewd drinking of Rabelais, the greatness of Louis XV as a voluptuary, "kisses for lepers" (charity to the sick), an "innocent game" with an old, false-toothed witch in her carriage.

The Significance. "What pleasure," asked "the last of the French giants," of his secretary, "can you find in picking up the careless words that trickle down my old beard?" The secretary knew what Florianet and the Abbe Ledieu (French Boswells) had done for their masters, Voltaire and Bossuet. The formal biographers, already marshaling facts, will come here to make their pictures mobile.

The Secretary. Fresh from his province, little Jean Jacques Brousson gulped with awe, despite bracers of cognac, on the morning of his first interview. He hid behind France's library ladder, fled unnoticed among other callers. France sent for him, took to his shyness. "How much do you earn?" "Nothing." "I will double your salary." And the master was rewarded for his kindness by modesty, honesty, devotion. Translator Pollock is admirably literal.

Kind Pains

MR. BISBEE'S PRINCESS--Julian Street -- Doubleday Page ($2.00). When you know that Booth Tarkington is one of his major literary heroes, you know Author Street for a kindly, unpretentious person. When you know that he devotes months to the perfection of a type of story that most Saturday Evening Post writers concoct in a fortnight, you add conscience to his qualities. It is thus that you find him, and have pleasure in his work--a shrewd, painstaking etcher of his fellows, who dilutes the acid of irony with the milk of human kindness.

Mr. Bisbee's Princess, the genuine article, brightly illumined the existence of that portly and proper small-town jeweler when he made her acquaintance on a train. Gossips beheld the illumination as the lurid glare of scandal. Bisbee's wife wailed and railed. Bisbee's business boomed. Long after, when the princess wrote for a pair of patent spectacles, Bisbee postured, privately but gallantly, with a paper cutter.

A Speaking Likeness of her honest, polite, industrious, thrifty father gave May Gates courage at last to take a stand against the penny-loose aristocrats into whose midst she married.

Syringas, charming and skilful, tells how Romance, once foregone out of caution, came back to Rosina Beckwith and chose her daughter.

Hero Dispute

CAPTAINS AND KINGS--Andre Mauois (translated by Lewis May)--Appleon ($1.50). As one would have guessed, The French psychologist who wrote the first unprejudiced life of Shelley (Ariel*) can conduct a philosophical argument with delicacy, wit and penetration. From his interest in Shelley, one would also have guessed that M. Maurois accepts the latter half of Plato's apothegm: "There are two kinds of causes; one necessary, the other divine," and agrees with Vauvenargues: "Genius depends largely on our passions." The three compact dialogs of the present volume, between a young platonist-aristocrat lieutenant and his old rationalist-radical tutor, run widely and vigorously over the pros" and cons of the proposition: A leader of men is born, not made.

Strong

FAME -- Micheline Keating -- Putnam ($2.00). A tangle of love, libertines and the pursuit of happiness among stage folk and artists, including an CEdipus twist where the high-strung heroine and her father, not knowing their relationship, nearly wed, is pretty strong stuff for a person of 18 to attempt in a first novel. Yet, for all her stock phrases, young Miss Keating has more than a smattering of stage lore, and accomplishes her broad effect with the naive directness of one to whom the ancient tatters of passion are shining raiment bright.

* ANATOLE FRANCE HIMSELF--Jean Jacques Bronson (translated by John Pollock)--Lippincott ($5.00).

' Reviewed in TIME, June 9, 1924.