October 12, 1924

Anatole France (April 16, 1844 to October 12, 1924), was one of the grand figures of French literature. Most famous as a novelist, France wrote in various genres. According to his Nobel Prize biographical note, "His literary output is vast, and though he is chiefly known as a novelist and storyteller, there is hardly a literary genre that he did not touch upon at one time or another." 

The next excerpt, struck me as a very contemporary sounding description of the modern cosmos:

We find it hard to picture to ourselves the state of mind of a man of older days who firmly believed that the Earth was the centre of the Universe, and that all the heavenly bodies revolved round it. He could feel beneath his feet the writhings of the damned amid the flames; very likely he had seen with his own eyes and smelt with his own nostrils the sulphurous fumes of Hell escaping from some fissure in [the earth]....Thus conceived, the Universe was so simple that it was fully and adequately represented, with its true shape and proper motion, in sundry great clocks compacted and painted by the craftsmen of the Middle Ages..... [For modern men the] solid vault of the firmament is cleft asunder. Our eyes and thoughts plunge into the infinite abysses of the heavens. Beyond the planets, we discover, instead of the Empyrean of the elect and the angels, a hundred millions of suns rolling through space, escorted each by its own procession of dim satellites, invisible to us. Amidst this infinitude of systems our Sun is but a bubble of gas and the Earth a drop of mud. The imagination is vexed and startled when the astronomers tell us that the luminous ray which reaches us from the pole-star has been half a century on the road; and yet that noble star is our next neighbour.... There are stars we still see in the field of our telescopes which ceased to shine, it may be, three thousand years ago.

This evocation was written in 1895,  (Le Jardin d’Épicure, (1895) The Garden of Epicurus) 

Some biographical information from the Nobel Prize website:

Anatole France, pseudonym for Jacques Anatole Thibault (1844-1924), was the son of a Paris book dealer..... For about twenty years he held diverse positions, but he always had enough time for his own writings, especially during his period as assistant librarian at the Senate from 1876 to 1890. .... France is a writer in the mainstream of French classicism. His style, modelled on Voltaire and Fénélon, as well as his urbane scepticism and enlightened hedonism, continue the tradition of the French eighteenth century. ...

France had written several stories and novels before he achieved his first great success with Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881). The novel received a prize from the Académie Française, of which France became a member in 1896.

In 1885 he published Le Livre de mon ami ...., a kind of autobiographical novel, which he continued with Pierre Nozière (1899), Le Petit Pierre (1918), and La Vie au fleur (1922) ..... From 1888 to 1892 France was the literary critic of the newspaper Le Temps. His reviews, inspired by the scepticism of Renan, but highly subjective, were collected in four volumes under the title La Vie littéraire (1888-92) .... About this time France turned sharply against the naturalism of Zola. His own work of this period consists of historical fiction that evokes past civilizations with great charm and deep insight. The period of transition from paganism to Christianity was one of his favourites. In 1889 appeared Balthazar, a fanciful version of the story of one of the Magi, and in 1890 Thaïs, the story of the conversion of an Alexandrian courtesan during the Christian era......

In his later years France became increasingly interested in social questions. He protested the verdict in the Dreyfus case and developed some sympathies for socialism. ...[Among his] last important works ...[was] a biography of Joan of Arc (1908),...

France was an animal lover, and this next feline reference is one of many in his books. The source is Histoire comique (A Mummer's Tale) (1903).  Here an actress is describing her symptoms:


"Are you subject to attacks of dizziness?"

"No. But, just think, doctor, at night, I see an imaginary cat, under the chairs or the table, gazing at me with fiery eyes!"

"Try not to dream of cats any more,.... To see a cat is a sign that you'll be betrayed by friends, or deceived by a woman."

"But it is not in my dreams that I see a cat! It's when I'm wide awake!"

Anatole France, like Borges, enjoyed a job as a librarian which gave him great amounts of time to do his own writing. Such literary economy may be a hidden loss, in the coming age of electronic books.