Madame Martin-Bellême says: "I see none of your own works, not a single statue or relief."
Dechartre replies: "Do you imagine that it would be a pleasure to me to live among my own works? I know them far too well ... they bore me."
That Dechartre is only a mask for France is almost acknowledged in what follows: "Even though I have modelled a few bad figures, I am no sculptor—rather a bit of a poet and philosopher."
In France's literary life, after a preparatory stage which lasted fifteen years, there are two periods, which differ so much from each other that one might almost say: There are two Frances.
In the first of these periods he is the refined satirist, who, from a station high above the human crowd, observes its endeavours and struggles with a superior, compassionate smile. In the second he appears as the combatant. He not only attaches himself to a party, but affirms as he does so his belief in the very things at which he has jested and scoffed—the sound instinct of the people, the significance of the majority, the increasing reality of progress—in the doctrines which as a thinker he had declined to accept, those of democracy and socialism.
When a friend once politely but plainly reproached him with this attitude as not perfectly honourable, France answered in a manner which avoided the real point by asking: "Do you know any other power capable of opposing that of the Church and Nationalism in combination except the Socialist Labour party?"
He turned the theoretical into a practical question.
When the friend remarked that he himself, under similar circumstances, had plainly announced his practical adherence to a party, but at the same time his dissent from its doctrine, France turned to some ladies who were present, and said, laughing: "Is he not impossible? As honest and obstinate as a donkey!"
For more than half of his life France undoubtedly agreed with his Abbé Coignard, who had an affectionate contempt for mankind, and who would not have signed the Declaration of the Rights of Man, not a line of it, "because of the sharply defined and unjust distinction made in it between man and the gorilla." He in those days inclined, like Coignard, to the belief that men are mischievous animals who can be kept under control only by force or cunning.
Even many years later, after he has proclaimed himself a democrat, he makes his mouthpiece, Bergeret, say to his dog: "To-morrow you will be in Paris. It is an illustrious and noble city. The nobility, to tell the truth, is not common to all its inhabitants. It is, on the contrary, to be found in only a very small number of the citizens. But a whole town, a whole nation, exists in a few individuals who think with more power and more justice than the rest." And later, in the same book, when Biquet, with gaping jaws and flaming eyes, has flown at the heels of the clever workman who has been setting up Bergeret's book-shelves, his master explains to him that what exalts a nation is not the foolish cry that resounds in the streets, but the silent thought which is conceived in a garret, and one day changes the face of the earth.