Meanwhile, Emma’s presence, even though it comforted France did not restrain him. That perhaps was partly why he had chosen her to live with him; there would be no need to behave himself in front of Emma who knew all about him. In the year following her advent into his home, there began what was probably the only other serious love-affair of his life. He had met an American, aged thirty-five, twice married, and now the wife of a Monsieur Gagey. She was his audience for much of The Gods Will Have Blood, on which he was working at the time. When it was finished, she wrote to him that it was in part hers since so much of it had been created under her very eyes. France appears to have seen the warning light. Sensing this, she wrote him a letter telling him she had never had much happiness, that her hold on life was very light and it would not take much to make her release it. France answered the letter but not the implied appeal. Madame Gagey killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. France attended the funeral where he had to face the accusations of Madame Gagey’s husband. A few days later he left for Cap d’Antibes with Emma.
If Madame Gagey, with some justification, could claim to have played a part in the creation of The Gods Will Have Blood, so too might have Madame Arman, for it had been begun in her company. But ultimately, The Gods Will Have Blood belongs to France himself, more so than any of his novels. For it is the most personal of them all.
The novel which first showed the influence of Madame Arman was Le Lys Rouge in 1894. This was written during their first journey together in Italy and is a tale of passion and jealousy, with characters identifiable in real life, and with fine descriptive scenes of Florence. France’s next two novels Le Jardin d’Épicure and Le Puits de Sainte-Claire in 1895 show a return to his more meditative manner. On 23 January 1896, France was elected to l’ Académie française and had reached a height of fame that was to continue for the next twenty years. Soon after his election the Dreyfus affair became a national political issue and, with Émile Zola, Anatole France came to the defence of Dreyfus.
The ‘affair’ is the main theme of four of his next six novels. He gave them the collective title L’Histoire contemporaine. they are L’Orme du mail (1897), Le Mannequin d’osier (1897), L’Anneau d’amethyste (1899), and Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901). These four loosely constructed novels contain some of France’s most imaginative writing: in them he attacks intolerance, injustice and dictatorship, and eloquently advocates free universal education, the separation of Church and State, social reform, the organization of labour, and the rights of minorities. It was as a result of the Dreyfus affair that he eventually became a supporter of the Russian Revolution and a member of the Communist Party, and that his novels increasingly assumed the character of social satire culminating in 1908 with his L’Île des pingouins which stands with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Voltaire’s Candide and Orwell’s Animal Farm as one of the most searingly satirical indictments of human folly.
In 1903 his Histoire Comique had told of the neutralization of a guilty passion by the suicide of the wronged lover – by no means a comic story. And in 1905, his Sur la pierre blanche contains a picture of a future world with no towns – by no means unworthy of H. G. Wells.
A few months before the publication of L’Île des pingouins in 1908, there had at last been published, in two volumes, his monumental Vie de Jeanne d’Arc, over which he had procrastinated for years. It was his chief bid for consideration as an historian, but it proved unpopular largely because he expounds the thesis that Joan of Arc was the victim of hallucinations, without military talent, of low intelligence, and only a tool in the hands of the clergy. A premonition of its adverse reception was probably the cause of the speed with which he wrote L’île des pingouins, which was published a few months later to overwhelming acclaim, and so remedied the blow to his reputation.
In 1912, at the age of sixty-eight, Anatole France published the book which is regarded as his masterpiece. Like many of his novels, The Gods Will Have Blood had first appeared serially, under the title Évariste Gamelin. In it, France breaks free from the bonds of classical restraint and reveals his own deeply felt personal emotions more openly than in any of his novels. The book is, nevertheless, written in the same style which he had developed over the years: a style impregnated with echoes of, and allusions to, the classical writers of the ancient world, and it is probably the marriage of such a style to a content so charged with emotion that caused Professor G. M. Trevelyan to observe, in passing, in his Clark Lectures of 1953: ‘I know I should be sorry to read Les Dieux ont soif, one of the world’s best historical novels, in anything except the French of Anatole France, which is not its robe but its skin.’
And France’s synthesis in this novel of classical style with romantic content also illustrates Paul Morand’s generalization to the effect that French writers are never younger, never more free from restraint, than when they have passed their sixtieth birthday. In this respect, André Maurois has pointed out that, ‘Voltaire wrote his best book, Candide, at sixty-five, and Anatole France his Les Dieux ont soif, at sixty-eight.’
The Gods Will Have Blood is not only the greatest novel Anatole France wrote, it is one of the greatest of French novels. All great literature universalizes some fundamental human problem. The Gods Will Have Blood is the only one of France’s novels to achieve this. It is artistically a perfectly balanced portrayal of human aspirations and failings. One of its two main themes recurs in many of France’s novels but in no other is it so well integrated into the narrative. It is the pathetic discrepancy between human ideals and thoughts on the one hand, and between human actions and passions on the other. In this novel, France has recast Lord Acton’s aphorism: ‘All ideals corrupt, fanatic ideals corrupt fanatically.’ The artist Gamelin could be any young terrorist of today led by his ideals to the fanatic and indiscriminate killing of innocent people in the name of ‘justice’ or ‘freedom’. France universalizes this theme by drawing a parallel between the fanatic Gamelin and the mad Orestes. This is brought out vividly when the poor, young artist is explaining his painting of Orestes and Electra to the Citizeness Rochemaure. He cites the passage in Euripides’ Orestes which inspired his painting and explains the tragic situation he has tried to represent. The parallel is emphasized later when Gamelin has been appointed to the Revolutionary Tribunal through the influence of the Citizeness Rochemaure and sends hundreds of people to the guillotine, including his own brother-in-law and the Citizeness Rochemaure herself. France constantly reminds the reader that Gamelin’s political fanaticism is identical with the crazed Orestes’ persecution by the Furies. Suffering under the illusion that his merciless ‘justice’ is the best way to serve humanity, he becomes a monster. Throughout the novel Gamelin grows more and more like the Orestes in his painting.
This objectively impersonal historical theme is closely interwoven with another theme, deeply personal to France himself: the conflict between love of life and the gift of thought; the gift of foreseeing the tragic possibilities and inevitabilities of life: poverty, loneliness, and death for oneself and those one loves.
In various forms, this theme also recurs in many of his books, but, again, in none other is it so well integrated, nor so free from bitterness. With it, France came close to the theme that Sartre was later to exploit: the tragic solitude of the thinker in a hostile community. In general, France’s conclusions are bitter, especially in his creation of the character Monsieur Bergeret in the four volumes of L’Histoire contemporaine, where he seems, like Flaubert, to have found most of his inspiration in the deep bitterness of all thought, a bitterness that with Flaubert reached a point of exasperation in Bouvard et Péchuchet. ‘By the mere fact that he thought, he was a strange being, disturbing and suspect to all.’… ‘Monsieur Bergeret is to be pitied, for he thinks.’ These are examples of two of France’s comments on Monsieur Bergeret. And when the reader is first introduced to Brotteaux des Ilettes in The Gods Will Have Blood, France makes Brotteaux say of his puppets, ‘These are my creatures. From me
they have received a perishable body, free from joy and sorrow. I’ve not given them the power of thought, since I’m a benevolent God.’
The protagonist of the impersonal historical theme set in the fifteen months immediately preceding the fall of Robespierre is Évariste Gamelin, a poor artist, an idealist, courageously caring for his artistic integrity and for his widowed mother. The protagonist of the theme deeply personal to France himself is Maurice Brotteaux des Ilettes, a cultured aristocrat, who under the old régime had possessed wealth, rank, estates, beautiful women and beautiful works of art, but who now possesses only a worn, puce-coloured coat, a copy of Lucretius, and his epicurean philosophy of life.
The accusation made by some critics that France’s characters are static is completely refuted by the character of Gamelin. France is at pains to show that Gamelin as a boy and as a young man was far from heartless. His mother relates incidents from his boyhood revealing his extreme sensitivity. He is shown early in the book giving away half his small ration of bread to a woman with a child whom he passes in the street, strangers but obviously ill and in greater need than himself, and then telling his mother he had eaten his share of the bread so that she might take hers without misgivings. Before the end of the book this same man has so changed, and France makes the change appear completely convincing, that he is prepared without a qualm to send his only sister to the guillotine.
This development of character, this change in Gamelin, is most apparent in his relationship with his mistress, Élodie Blaise, the daughter of a picture-dealer. Hers is a hard-won victory, seducing the pale, ascetic young idealist. And she gets far more than she bargained for. As the fanatic flame of Gamelin’s idealism burns fiercer and fiercer and his hands become red with the blood of countless innocent people, France, with a psychological insight in advance of his time, causes her to experience the horrible delights of sexual masochism.
The relationship between Gamelin and Élodie Blaise is also the occasion for one of the supreme examples of France’s use of irony. The circumstances in which he uses it is also a refutation of another accusation that critics have brought against France: that he interposes himself between the reader and his characters and tells the reader what he should feel. In no way does France tell the reader how he should feel about the relationship between Gamelin and Élodie. There is no indictment, no denunciation; all is in the style of classical restraint. France merely uses the expedient of making Élodie say exactly the same words when she parts at the end of the book from her new lover, Desmahis, as she said when she parted from Gamelin on the night they first made love.
France’s mastery of irony permeates the book. He wishes to convey that, though he has to focus the reader’s attention on the grim activities of the men of the Revolutionary Tribunal, everyday life went on much as usual: people went to work, women gossipped, children played with their dogs in the street. Even the names of the Revolutionary leaders, now synonymous with the French Revolution, often meant nothing to the ordinary people. France brings this home with the same devastating ironic effect as when at the end of his famous short story The Procurator of Judaea Pontius Pilate is asked if he remembers a man named Jesus from Nazareth who was crucified for some crime, and Pilate after thinking deeply for a few moments murmurs: ‘Jesus? Jesus – of Nazareth? I cannot call him to mind.’ For when Gamelin, having heard with horror of the assassination of Marat, is hastening to pay his last respects to the murdered leader, he is stopped in the street by an old woman who asks him: ‘if this Monsieur Marat who had been assassinated was not Monsieur le Curé Mara, from Saint-Pierre-de-Queyroix’.
The personal theme represented by Maurice Brotteaux des Ilettes is made doubly significant by Emma Laprevotte. Some years after her installation in his house, when she was considerably more to France than his housekeeper, though not yet his wife, she told a friend Marcel le Goff: ‘In Les Dieux ont soif Monsieur France has imagined what would happen to himself in a time of trouble, deprived of his possessions, of his books, of all his belongings – he was Brotteaux.’
The characters of Brotteaux and Gamelin are an aspect of France’s achievement in The Gods Will Have Blood which no critical appreciation of his work appears to have noted. With these two characters he succeeds in one of the most formidable tasks an author can undertake: the presentation of a very good man and of a very bad man. Apart from Dostoyevsky, few authors have attempted the creation of either, and Dostoyevsky’s saints and criminals too often appear to inhabit the world of William Blake, Milton or Dante, rather than the world of ordinary men and women. Among the few novelists who have made the attempt with any success to create a good man in a credible world are Anthony Trollope with the Rev. Septimus Harding in The Warden, Elizabeth Bowen with Major Brutt in The Death of the Heart, and Georges Simenon with Louis Cuchas in The Little Saint.
Anatole France is one of the very few authors who have successfully portrayed both a very good man and a very wicked man in the same novel. And there is irony and paradox in his creation of both. For Gamelin, who worships Rousseau and believes in the essential goodness of men, aims at doing good and yet his every action, under the influence of this aim, is evil. Brotteaux des Ilettes, who believes in the essential evil of men, aims merely at enjoying ‘the pleasure there is in life itself’, and yet his every action, under the influence of this aim, is good.
In real life, contact with a genuinely good man does not leave us with the impression that he is like ourselves only better; that somehow he makes a more successful struggle to do right than we do. On the contrary, he appears to live on some other level than ourselves. A very good man gives us the impression he has gone beyond ethics. He does not seem to know that he is good. So when, at the end, Brotteaux is seated beside the young prostitute, whom he has befriended with no ulterior motive, as the tumbril takes them both to the guillotine, the old aristocrat contemplates the young girl’s white breasts and ‘is filled with regret for the light of day’ (one of the many deliberate classical allusions by France) – and we know that in Brotteaux we have experienced what a genuinely good man must be like. What is more, we feel that he does not know that he is good. France has made sure that we shall feel this by the scene a few pages earlier when the monk, Father Longuemare, asks the atheist, Brotteaux, to pray for him: ‘Monsieur, I ask you one favour: this God in Whom you do not yet believe, pray to Him for me. It is possible that you may be nearer to Him than I am myself: a moment and we shall know. Only one second, and you may have become one of the Lord’s most dearly beloved children. Monsieur, pray for me.’ France has made us come to recognize, like the monk has done, true goodness when we see it.
In his creation of Gamelin, France with classical symmetry brings the Orestes theme full circle. At the beginning of the novel Gamelin explains his painting of Orestes and Electra to the Citizeness Rochemaure in the following words:
‘Hennequin painted the madness of Orestes in a masterly manner. But surely it is the grief of Orestes that appeals to us even more poignantly than his madness… In order that he might revenge outraged justice, he had repudiated Nature, made himself into a monster…’
Towards the end of the novel, when Gamelin learns from his mother that his sister Julie, who has married an emigré, has returned to Paris, he threatens that he will have her sent to the guillotine if he finds her:
The poor mother, white as her coif, let her knitting fall from her trembling hands and murmured in a sighing voice, fainter than the faintest whisper: ‘I did not want to believe it, but I see it is true: he is a monster…’
The identification is complete: the mother has recognized the wickedness of her son.
Anatole France’s subtle prose style has been the delight and despair of critics. It is possible here only to indicate briefly its two main features. France’s two chief stylistic devices were his use of startlingly unusual contrasts and antitheses and his use of the right word, the ideal mot juste. Without his use of contrast and antithesis none of the tragic or ironic
implications which France aimed at could have been achieved. The series of sharp contrasts in the opening paragraphs of The Gods Will Have Blood fill the solemnity of the church of the Barnabites with the fear of the Terror and achieve the effect of creating the tense, tragic atmosphere of the time. A very different, more ironic, effect is achieved a little later in the book when we come to the series of contrasts between Brotteaux’s pleasant past life and the almost comical jobs he has to undertake in order to keep alive after the Revolution.
France’s aim is that of oxymoron, to startle, surprise or amuse the reader. This device is most apparent in his choice of seemingly incongruous adjectives and in the juxtaposition of apparently contradictory nouns and adjectives. At the close of the first chapter of The Gods Will Have Blood France describes the men of the Revolutionary Committee as working with ‘fanatic patience’ and ‘serene fanaticism’. Later we find Gamelin admiring the ‘reasoned dogmatism’ of the leaders of the Revolution, and the girl Athénaïs being described as the ‘innocent prostitute’.
The second main element in France’s style is his preoccupation with the smallest unit of language. To France, the ‘word’ was sacred, chosen for all time. His life-long search for the right word in the right place derived from his conscience as a verbal artist. He sought perfection, knowing full well it was unattainable. What made the search for the ideal mot juste more difficult for France was that, like many foreign students of the French language, he could never master the agreement of past participles! He once told a young friend, ‘My greatest pleasure is to purify my style, to weigh the true, the etymological meaning of each word, for each word is an individual which has its own origins, its ancestors, its birth, its ups and downs, in short its history.’1
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