The Project Gutenberg EBook of Marguerite, by Anatole France

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Marguerite
1921

Author: Anatole France

Illustrator: Simeon

Translator: J. Lewis May

Release Date: May 9, 2008 [EBook #25406]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARGUERITE ***

Produced by David Widger

MARGUERITE

By Anatole France

Translated From The French By J. Lewis May

With Twenty-Nine Original Woodcuts By Simeon

London, John Lane Company, MCMXXI

[Illustration: titlepage 010]

PREFATORY LETTER

Publish Marguerite, dear Monsieur Andre Coq, if you so desire, but pray
relieve me from all responsibility in the matter.

It would argue too much literary conceit on my part were I anxious to
restore it to the light of day. It would argue, perhaps, still more did
I endeavour to keep it in obscurity. You will not succeed in wresting it
for long from the eternal oblivion where-unto it is destined. Ay me, how
old it is! I had lost all recollection of it. I have just read it over,
without fear or favour, as I should a work unknown to me, and it does
not seem to me that I have lighted upon a masterpiece. It would ill
beseem me to say more about it than that. My only pleasure as I read it
was derived from the proof it afforded that, even in those far-off days,
when I was writing this little trifle, I was no great lover of the Third
Republic with its pinchbeck virtues, its militarist imperialism, its
ideas of conquest, its love of money, its contempt for the handicrafts,
its unswerving predilection for the unlovely. Its leaders caused me
terrible misgivings. And the event has surpassed my apprehensions.

But it was not in my calculations to make myself a laughing-stock, by
taking Marguerite as a text for generalizations on French politics of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The specimens of type and the woodcuts you have shown me promise a very
comely little book.

Believe me, dear Monsieur Coq,

Yours sincerely,

Anatole France.

La Bechellerie, 16th April, 1920.

MARGUERITE

[Illustration: 018]

5th July

As I left the Palais-Bourbon at five