Since then, somehow, we cannot profess to know exactly how or why, a change appears to have come over him; a change not altogether for the worse, nor altogether for the better. Life, in his eyes, is no longer so bright as it was. He is more serious, more satirical, less disposed to mind his rhyme and let the river run under the bridge; a little out of conceit with his old rôle of saunterer and looker-on. He seems to have heard a drum-beat, and if there is to be a fight, he will, after a rather independent fashion of his own, bear a hand in it. Perhaps this is the manlier part. At all events, there is no quarreling with it, and the evil days on which Anatole France has fallen (“le perfide Anatole France,” as we are told that his political enemies—a strange word for use in connection with the author of “Sylvestre Bonnard” and “Le Jardin d’Épicure”—are accustomed to call him) have borne their full share of fruit.
His second manner, to call it so, is like his first in this regard, that its most successful creation is an old scholar. M. Bergeret is Sylvestre Bonnard with a difference, as the present Anatole France, is the old Anatole France with a difference. It strikes us as almost a pleasantry of Fate that these two leading characters should stand thus as representatives of their creator’s two selves, or, if one prefers to express it so, of their creator’s one self in his two periods of calm and storm.
Sylvestre Bonnard’s life ran an even course. Its incidents were no more than the windings and falls of a quiet brook,—just enough to keep it wholesomely alive and give it a desirable diversity and picturesqueness. The world was good to him; and he thanked it. If he did not marry the girl with the pair of blue eyes,—the eyes de pervenche,—he was happier in his bachelorhood than the majority of men are in their married condition, and doubly happy toward the last, when time and chance (with more or less of human assistance) brought him his heart’s desire in the opportunity to care for his lost Clementine’s grandchild. His professional successes were according to his taste: he was a member of the Institute, an authority upon ancient texts, and in his old age the happy author of a book upon a new hobby.
Such was the life of a savant as M. Anatole France conceived it before the world was too much with him, before “Nationalists” and “Royalists” had begun to look askance upon him, and call him traitor.
M. Bergeret, like M. Bonnard, is a man of kindly nature, a scholar, and a lover of peace, but life to him, as to Shelley, has been “dealt in another measure;” a disloyal wife, uncongenial daughters, squalor in his house, disappointment in his calling, lack of favor with his colleagues and superiors, and, to fill his cup, the Dreyfus controversy, which makes him a target for stoning.
And in the midst of it all, notwithstanding it all, what a dear old soul, and what an interesting talker!—so amiably philosophical, so keen in his thrusts, so sly in his humor, so fond of good company, his own and his dog’s included, and, in spite of his weaknesses, so equal to the occasion! If he is irreligious, according to his neighbors’ standards, it is at least “with decency and good taste.”
The four volumes in which he figures (“Histoire Contemporaine,” they are jointly called), like all the works of their author, are crammed with clever sayings. There is no great story, of course, though some of the incidents are many shades too lively to be set in modest English type; but the characterization and the dialogue are of the best,—in the good Yankee sense of the word, “complete.”
For its full appreciation the book—it is really one, in spite of its four titles—demands a more familiar acquaintance with the ins and outs of current French politics than the average American reader is likely to bring to it. There are so many wheels within wheels, and the intrigues are made, of set purpose on the author’s part, to turn upon desires and considerations so almost incredibly sordid and petty! It is a comedy; we are bound to laugh; but it is also a horror, and is meant to be. Satire was never more biting. The game of provincial politics, bishop-making and all, is played with merciless particularity before the reader’s eyes; and if he fails to follow some of the moves with perfect intelligence, he sees only too well the smallness and baseness and cruelty of the whole; a game in which a matron’s honor is no more than a pawn upon the chessboard, to be given and taken without so much as an extra pulse-beat, even an extra pulse-beat of her own. If it be true, or within a thousand miles of true,—well, to repeat the saying of one of old, a critic accounted wise in his day, “man hath no preëminence above a beast!”
Poor M. Bergeret! He ought to have been so happy! Like his human creator, he was born for life in a cloister, some Abbaye de Thélème, where he should have had nothing to do but to read his books, say his prayers, mind a few cabbages, perhaps, and be quiet; and instead of that, here he is passing his days in such a turmoil that he experiences a kind of joy on finding himself in the street, the one place where he gets a taste of “that sweetest of good things, philosophical liberty.” And with all the rest of his tribulations there falls upon him that dreadful nightmare of the Dreyfus case. Neither he nor his neighbors can let it alone. It is like the bitterness of aloes in all their conversation.
One resource he still has; one neighbor, better still, one housemate, with whom he can discuss anything, even the “Affaire,” with no risk of being stoned or misunderstood. His dog Riquet, though he “does not understand irony” (a congenital deficiency, it must have been, with such opportunities), is to our Maître de Conférences à la Faculté des Lettres a true friend in need. For that matter, indeed, M. Bergeret is probably not the only man who has found it one of the best points in a dog’s favor that you can say to him anything you please. If your human neighbor stands in perishing need of wholesome truth, or if you stand in sore need of expressing it to him, and if there happens to be some not unnatural unwillingness on his part, or some momentary lack of courage on yours, why, you have only to deliver your message to him vicariously, as it were, to the sensible relief of your own mind, if not to the edification of his.