Anatole France is certainly not! one of the prophets without honour in their own country. He would have had a national funeral had he not happened to die. during the Parliamentary recess; and Parlin ment alone can accord this supreme posthumous honour to a citizen. As hho will have a funeral at the public expense, which is the same thing to all intents and purposes. To-morrow there will be a great ceremony on the Quai Malaquais, in front of the old house in which' he was born, His coffin will be placed on a catafalque, and his merits will be extolled in a series of polished] cations. The pupils of the Paris colleges will have a half-holiday, so to make "their young. minds realize that the eduntry hag lost a great' writer, and they' wilt come in procession and stew flowers'or the catafalque; and-then! Anatole France oeill rest with-his {ather and mother vin Neuitly: Gemeteryi- 12 "72
He must have smiled if he ever thought about thy fuss that would bbe made over his "mortal remains. He would have preferred the real regret shown by the plain people round about the country home in which he died, atid the poor old woman who walked many miles with liber daughter and grandson to see him on" his death-bed.—Anatole rane was a master of irony, but it was not of the bitter type, for he was essentially good-natured. Shortly after his election to. the Académie Frangnise in 1896, I took his photograph with a fixed-focus box camera at his house in the Villa Said, and I shall never forget the jizzical smile with which he sat at his table while T measured the distance between his nose and the liens with a piece of string! I have forgotten what he suid during the interview, but I retain a very strong impression of the courtesy with which he answered many questions that must have struck him as futile.
He was surley bored, but he eontrived to look as if he' liked it. He passed the supreme test of inter~ view politeness. I wonder if itrever occurred to him that his brain would be removed after his death by a professor of anatomy, measured, photographed, minutely examined and finally preserved in spirits and put into a small casket, finally placed in the inner coffin, together with a sample of the spirit, Anatole France's intimates apparently anticipate that, in the distant future, someone will want to dig up his remains, so as to find out what kind of cerebral convolutions produced Lo Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard" and created that delightfully intellectual and unpractical type Monsieur Bergeret.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.