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  PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS

  THE GODS WILL HAVE BLOOD

  Anatole France (Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault) was born in Paris in 1844, the only son of a book-dealer. His childhood and education, mostly self-acquired through voracious reading, are described with tenderness, humour and some licence in Le Livre de mon ami (1855), Pierre Nozière (1899), Le Petit Pierre (1918) and La Vie en fleur (1922).

  Soon after leaving schoool he obtained employment with a publishing company. During the next twenty years, besides bibliographical and cataloguing work, his work as publisher’s reader and the writing of prefaces for editions of the classics, he contributed to various reviews and published a study of Alfred de Vigny (1868). Les Poèmes dorés (1873) and Les Noces corinthiennes, a poetic drama (1876), mark the beginning of his creative work proper, and both show the strong influence of the Parnassiens. From 1876 to 1890 he was an assistant librarian at the Senate, which gave him ample free time for his writing. He also became a regular contributor to Le Globe and L’Univers illustré, and published Jocaste et le Chat maigre (1879) and a highly successful novel, Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881). In 1888 he became literary editor of Le Temps, a leading daily, and about this time became associated with Mme Arman de Caillavet, whose salon was a centre of French literary life. He entered actively into the world of contemporary letters and by 1897, a year after his election to the Académie française, had come to dominate that world. The decisive shift in his career as a writer came with his participation in the Dreyfus case on behalf of the convicted Jewish officer. It marked the first stage of his emergence as one of the ‘representative men’ of his epoch, and brought about his conversion to socialism. Subsequent works reflected this sharpened humane concern and a powerful distrust of clerical obscurantism, seen particularly in his pungent satirical portraits of French social and political life in the four volumes of the Histoire contemporaine.

  Anatole France was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. His last years were spent in retirement in his Touraine property, La Béchellerie. He died in 1924.

  Frederick Davies was widely known as the translator of the plays of Carlo Goldoni, of which Four Comedies has been published in the Penguin Classics. He was a Fellow Commoner of Churchill College, Cambridge, where he translated Goldoni’s Memoirs. Frederick Davies also translated Three French Farces and Daudet’s Letters from My Windmill for the Penguin Classics, as well as a number of plays by Molière and Labiche. He was the editor of the Diaries of John Cowper Powys and he also wrote two novels for children. Frederick Davies died in February 1990.

  The Gods Will Have Blood

  (Les Dieux ont soif)

  Translated with an Introduction by

  FREDERICK DAVIES

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published (in French as Les Dieux ont soif in 1912)

  This translation first published in Penguin Classics 1979

  Reprinted in Penguin Books 1990

  Reprinted 2004

  8

  This translation and Introduction copyright © Frederick Davies, 1979

  All rights reserved

  The translator wishes to acknowledge gratefully the help of Jean and Roderick McKie in the transcribing and typing of several drafts of the manuscript during the translation of this novel

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90935–6

  For EDWARD THOMPSON, in appreciation of our long association with the works of Carlo Goldoni

  INTRODUCTION

  New readers are advised that this Introduction makes the details of the plot explicit.

  IN 1896, Anatole France was elected a member of l’ Académie française, a highly coveted honour in those days as well as good business for an author. In 1921, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  Anatole France’s election to l’ Académie française was not without much opposition. His attacks on Church and State had earned him many enemies on the Right. One of the aristocratic establishment said to him on the eve of the election: ‘Everything in your writings, monsieur, shocks my beliefs. But genius is a gift of God. I should oppose the will of heaven if I did not vote for you.’ Another promised to vote for France, but trusted he would not be successful, ‘since I have never heard of a case where a superior man was elected the first time’. On hearing of this, France remarked dryly: ‘He must have made several applications himself.’

  His award of the Nobel Prize in 1921 was in spite of his vehement denunciations of the Versailles Treaty and his continuous attacks on the Catholic Church. Some of his books had been banned in libraries before the award. After it, all his books without exception were ‘placed on the Index’ by the Roman Curia because of ‘excess of utterances that were communistic and anti-clerical in tone’. When he went to Stockholm to receive the Prize he is reported to have said regarding the Treaty of Versailles: ‘The most horrible of wars was followed by a treaty which was not a treaty of peace but a prolongation of the war.’

  In 1896, as was customary for a newly elected member of l’ Académie française, France had to deliver a eulogistic address about his predecessor. He had succeeded to de Lesseps’ chair and in his address there was nothing that could offend any of the traditionalists. For that reason it has been much cited by those critics who wish to prove France’s essential conservatism. The address was delivered by France, attired in the customary broidered costume of green and black, wearing the cocked hat, and with the useless sword at his side, in a crowded amphitheatre before the élite of Paris. Such a numerous and brilliant assembly had not been seen for years. Among the Ambassadors, Ministers of State, Princes and Dukes who witnessed the scene was a boy, Pierre Champion, who later wrote:

  I recall the packed amphitheatre… Finally Anatole France arrived in his uniform. I had glimpsed him sometimes in our bookshop, with his well-groomed and lively air, his charming courtesy… In religious silence, he stood and read his speech, in praise of Ferdinand de Lesseps… I had to re-read the éloge later, to appreciate its courage and its simple beauty.

  Twenty-one years later, in 1927, when Anatole France had been dead over two years, the man who was elected to take his place and sit in his chair at l’ Académie française, delivered a very different address about his predecessor – an incident worth recalling, since it indicates in essence most of the reasons for the decline of the popularity and fame of Anatole France.

  The twenty-five years before the First World War, the period of Anatole France’s enormous popularity and fame, had been largely characterized by a predominance of Natu
ralist and socialist literature – the great reputations in England and France had been those of Shaw, Wells, Bennett, Zola, Rolland and Anatole France – largely in reaction against the Romanticism of the earlier part of the century. But, during those twenty-five years before the First World War, a growing disillusion and weariness had been gaining expression in the writings of a small coterie who became known as the Symbolists. Their writings were later to achieve a short but widespread influence after the war. For, when the war ended in the impoverishment and exhaustion of all the European nations involved, a general disillusion with politics and with all attempts to organize mankind in the service of some common ideal caused Western literature to become receptive to a less idealistic attitude, indifferent to action and unconcerned with social groups. Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Proust became the heirs of the Symbolists. These writers wrote in isolation, uninvolved with, and disengaged from, the issues of the time. None of them would have rushed, risking their literary reputations and the loss of their friends, as Zola and France did, to the defence of a Dreyfus.

  In 1927, one of this new generation of writers, Paul Valéry, was elected to l’ Académie française to fill the chair left vacant by the death of Anatole France, and had the customary honour of delivering the address on his predecessor. On this important occasion, Paul Valéry behaved in a most unconventional way. The uniforms of l’ Académie française were always passed on from generation to generation, and a new member had to fit himself as best he could from such old uniforms as were available. Paul Valéry, however, astounded the Academicians by appearing in a smart, new uniform made for him by a fashionable tailor. The address on Anatole France which he then read was received with even greater astonishment.

  Instead of the usual eulogy, Valéry delivered what can hardly be described as anything but a vicious attack. In all his own writing, France had always maintained the lucidity and simplicity of the French tradition, against which Valéry and the Symbolists had rebelled. France, moreover, had occasionally poked fun at the Symbolists, and had even said that he could ‘never believe in the success of a literary school which expressed difficult thoughts in obscure language’. Valery took his revenge. In what should have been his complimentary obituary upon Anatole France, Valéry became the first to enumerate most of the charges which have been made against France since his death. Valéry referred to the gossip that, if it had not been for Madame Arman de Caillavet, France would never have accomplished anything; to the repetitiveness, the mechanical neatness of form, in the novels of a man who had lived long enough to produce inferior as well as good ones; to the digressive nature of much of France’s work which tends to turn some of his novels into abstract discussions about God, democracy, justice; to France’s prudence, with the implication that he was timid and insincere, conveniently forgetting that the man who had failed to defend Symbolism, had invited popular hatred and the loss of his friends, by coming to the defence of the Jewish Dreyfus; and finally he referred, his last patronizing disparagement, to Anatole France’s humble origins, concluding that in view of his lack of formal education, France had really done very well.

  Anatole France was born Jacques-Anatole Thibault, in Paris in 1844, the only child of François Thibault, an old soldier and a devout Catholic, who kept a small bookshop on the Quai Malaquais, specializing in rare books and manuscripts, and who, when writing bibliophile articles, signed himself France Libraire, France being short for François in his native Anjou. The son of a shoemaker in Anjou, Anatole’s father had taught himself to read and write during his military service. As a shopkeeper he lacked business instincts and, as Anatole mentions later, would prefer to read his books than to sell them. His shop, however, became a meeting-place for scholars and authors, and this daily contact as a boy with thinkers and writers, with wits and critics must have played a vital part in the development of Anatole France as a psychologist and stylist.

  France himself was later to declare: ‘Ah, home is a fine school.’ He hated the school his parents sent him to: the Jesuit College Stanislaus. He resented the gibes of teachers and students and would play truant along the quais of the Seine. When the Professor’s report was: ‘Progress nil: conduct bad’, and his father had brought himself to accept the Professor’s verdict that the boy would never accomplish anything in the arts or the sciences, his mother whispered something to him that he never forgot: ‘Be a writer, my son. You have brains and you will make the envious hold their tongues.’ His mother was Flemish, unfailingly optimistic and practical, important qualities in the household with an absent-minded father. She was, moreover, an accomplished story-teller and her only child proved an avid listener. Among his last words on his deathbed, France, that only child, who had become not only the famous writer she had foreseen, but also ‘a genial mocker at life’, an epicurean who believed in the importance of but two things, beauty and goodness, called upon the name of his mother. Some critics, incidentally, have seen in France ‘a mother’s boy’. Be that as it may, the extreme licentiousness of his late ’teens and early twenties soon exhausted the patience of both his mother and father, and for a time, until his marriage and the publication of his second book in 1872, he lived in a garret, often on the verge of starvation.

  France’s first literary efforts were in verse and he had many poems published in the smaller reviews. It was in one of these that he first signed himself ‘Anatole France’, in allusion to his father’s pseudonym. The best of his poems were published in a collected edition in 1872: Les Poèmes dorés. They show the influence of the ancient classics, an influence which was to remain with him all his life. His first published work was in 1868: Étude sur Alfred Vigny. At the age of twenty-one he found employment in the Senate library under Leconte de Lisle – a position which, like Daudet’s first employment in Paris, was more or less a sinecure and allowed him plenty of time for writing. His first attempts in prose narrative, two short novels, Jocaste and Le Chat maigre, were published in one volume in 1879. They show the influence of Daudet and of Dickens and lack his later distinctive style, that complex blend of irony, pity, sensuality, love of beauty and worldly wisdom. This style, or manner, was first revealed with the publication in 1881 of Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, his first full-length novel. The book is about a philologist, a passionate hunter after rare manuscripts, whose gentle nature and generous heart make him an endearing figure, and Anatole France has justly been credited with the creation of a new genre: the ‘bookish’ novel, in which the scholar’s temperament, preoccupations and ‘angst’, whimsically bound up with the trifles of everyday life, become the very subject-matter of the novel. This idea of le bon maître, the gentle, eccentric, life-loving philosopher-teacher, he developed in his next novel in 1882, Les Désirs de Jean Servien, a story of the Commune in which the Marquis Tudesco di Venezia, lover of poetry and good wine, undertakes the education of a poor book-binder’s son.

  In 1885 he published Le Livre de mon ami, a delightful selection of his childhood memories. In 1886 he joined the staff of Le Temps and in 1888 became its literary editor. In this position he was able to use to the full his individual qualities: the many facets of his great intelligence, his ability to allow his imagination and prodigious memory to play around a wide variety of themes – qualities which in themselves imply his limitations as a writer – his inability, or rather, marked reluctance, to undertake sustained work. As a critic, he became the leading impressionist of his time, maintaining the subjectivity of all critical judgements.

  In 1889 appeared a volume of stories, entitled Balthasar after the first of them. This was followed in 1890 by Thaïs, a story about a courtesan of Alexandria converted by the monk Paphautius. In 1891 France left the Senate library after a dispute with Leconte de Lisle. A volume a year ensued during the next five years. In 1892 came L’Étui de nacre containing fifteen stories, the best being Le Procurateur de Judée. Then, in 1893, came La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque, one of his masterpieces, in which he develops le bon maître into the type of c
haracter which was to recur in many of his succeeding novels – the lay saint – reaching its apotheosis in the character Brotteaux des Ilettes in Les Dieux ont soif (The Gods Will Have Blood).

  The real hero of La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque is not Jacques Ménétrier, the rotisseur’s son who becomes a book-dealer: it is the Abbé Jérôme Coignard, humanist and theologian. France, indeed, was so delighted with his own creation, that in spite of Coignard’s violent death, he brought him to life again the following year in Les Opinions de Jérôme Coignard.

  A change of style is apparent in his next novel, Le Lys Rouge, in 1894. The change was largely owing to the liaison he had begun with a married woman, Madame Arman de Caillavet, who held every week in her house in Paris what were among the last of the famous Parisian salons. France’s own marriage, in 1877, to Valerie Guérin, by whom he had one child, a daughter Suzanne, though undoubtedly a ‘mariage de convenance.’ had been a happy one for a while but incompatibilities led to a divorce in 1892, and for almost twenty years France was to be captivated and largely dominated by Madame Arman de Caillavet. He finally rebelled against her assumption, and that of others, that his literary eminence would never have been achieved without her.

  In 1909 he sailed to South America, having deliberately accepted an invitation to lecture there and, as deliberately, refused to allow Madame Arman to accompany him. On the ship he immediately began an affair with an actress, Jeanne Brindeau, continuing it openly on his arrival in South America knowing full well that word of it would reach Madame Arman. When his secretary, Brousson, remonstrated with him, France gave him his return ticket. On his own return, five months later, there was an attempted reconciliation with Madame Arman. It was unsuccessful and her death a few months later was hastened by his break with her.

  There is no doubt that for several years France suffered poignant remorse at his treatment of the woman who had been the great love of his life, yet his release from her domination appears to have brought about a rejuvenation. Now well into his sixties he began a number of love-affairs with women much younger than himself. What was eventually, however, to prove more significant was his installation as his housekeeper of Emma Laprevotte, Madame Arman’s maid. She was thirty-nine, a woman who knew her place and kept to it. That place, in France’s house and heart grew swiftly, but it was not until 1920, four years before his death, that he married her.