As a writer of fiction, Anatole France made his debut in 1879 with ‘Jocaste’, and ‘Le Chat Maigre’.  Success in this field was yet decidedly doubtful when ‘Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard’ appeared in 1881.  It at once established his reputation; ‘Sylvestre Bonnard’, as ‘Le Lys Rouge’ later, was crowned by the French Academy.  These novels are replete with fine irony, benevolent scepticism and piquant turns, and will survive the greater part of romances now read in France.  The list of Anatole France’s works in fiction is a large one.  The titles of nearly all of them, arranged in chronological order, are as follows:  ’Les Desirs de Jean Seyvien (1882); Abeille (1883); Le Livre de mon Ami (1885); Nos Enfants (1886); Balthazar (1889); Thais (1890); L’Etui de Naire (1892); Jerome Coignard, and La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedanque (1893); and Histoire Contemporaine (1897-1900), the latter consisting of four separate works:  ’L’Orme du Mail, Le Mannequin d’Osier, L’Anneau d’Amethyste, and Monsieur Bergeret a Paris’.  All of his writings show his delicately critical analysis of passion, at first playfully tender in its irony, but later, under the influence of his critical antagonism to Brunetiere, growing keener, stronger, and more bitter.  In ‘Thais’ he has undertaken to show the bond of sympathy that unites the pessimistic sceptic to the Christian ascetic, since both despise the world.  In ‘Lys Rouge’, his greatest novel, he traces the perilously narrow line that separates love from hate; in ‘Opinions de M. l’Abbe Jerome Coignard’ he has given us the most radical breviary of scepticism that has appeared since Montaigne.  ’Le Livre de mon Ami’ is mostly autobiographical; ‘Clio’ (1900) contains historical sketches.

To represent Anatole France as one of the undying names in literature would hardly be extravagant.  Not that I would endow Ariel with the stature and sinews of a Titan; this were to miss his distinctive qualities:  delicacy, elegance, charm.  He belongs to a category of writers who are more read and probably will ever exercise greater influence than some of greater name.  The latter show us life as a whole; but life as a whole is too vast and too remote to excite in most of us more than a somewhat languid curiosity.  France confines himself to themes of the keenest personal interest, the life of the world we live in.  It is herein that he excels!  His knowledge is wide, his sympathies are many-sided, his power of exposition is unsurpassed.  No one has set before us the mind of our time, with its half-lights, its shadowy vistas, its indefiniteness, its haze on the horizon, so vividly as he.

In Octave Mirbeau’s notorious novel, a novel which it would be complimentary to describe as naturalistic, the heroine is warned by her director against the works of Anatole France, “Ne lisez jamais du Voltaire. . .  C’est un peche mortel . . . ni de Renan . . . ni de l’Anatole France.  Voila qui est dangereux.”  The names are appropriately united; a real, if not precisely an apostolic, succession exists between the three writers.