entirely pleasant; there is a kind of willful insistence upon the hardness and selfishness and the cold-blooded sensuality of the sitter. But the work has "the note of authenticity." It is, so far as it goes, "Boswellian"; that is to say, it is objective, intelligently and picturesquely concrete, shameless, significant. But it is not, like Boswell's work on Johnson, comprehensive and exhaustive. Boswell, the sad dog, painted his Johnson and everyman's Johnson—the eccentric fellow who saved orange peel and the pious soul humbled before his God. M. Brousson hardly suggests the existence of Mr. May's Virgilian "poet," who indubitably was a part of Anatole France "himself." Therefore a more modest and honest title for this book would be "My Anatole France," or "Anatole France in Slippers," as in the original.
Within his limits, M. Brousson is delicious. He presents himself as a young man from the country, newly come yp to Paris with a bundle of diplomas from a provincial university, with a classical education, but with slight knowledge of contemporary letters—eager, erudite and unsophisticated, researching in the libraries for archeologists, to earn his keep, and shyly aspiring to literary distinction. Anatole France, fitfully working over his bags full of Joan of Arc manuscript, sends for him to assist in the reduction of that chaos, accumulated through twenty years. The church is talking of making a saint of the Virgin of Domrémy; and it behooves the great iconoclast to get to the public before the canonization. "Imagine," says M. Brousson, "the emotions of the young man from the country." To save money he walks six kilometers to the Villa Said for his first interview. He is in such awe of the master that he stops at all the cheap
