Anatole France
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Anatole France (April 16, 1844 - October 12, 1924) was the pen name of French author Jacques Anatole François Thibault. He was born in Paris, and died in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France. He was awarded Nobel Prize in Literature 1921.
He is the author of The Garden of Epicurus (1895), a collection of prose.
The loftiest intelligences, the most unperturbed, the kindest: Democritus, Epicurus, Gassendi.
Among all vain hopes which may arise into a sick brain, glory is the most ridicoulous and the most woeful
Evil is necessary. If it was not there, good wouldn't be there either. Evil is the sole ground of good. What would be boldness in the absence of distress, and pity without pain?
In The Gods Are Athirst (1912), a fiction about terror set during the most horrifying years of the French Revolution («the freedom's despotism»), he quotes Lucretius and Epicurus.
The character of Brotteaux des Ilettes, former financier, materialist sage and courageous, sentenced to death, having given shelter to an ideologically persecuted Barnabite monk, during the French Revolution, is a spokesman of the writer, who is on the same wavelength as Epicurus about abstention from mob's political imagination: «General opinion, for most people, is only an excuse on not having a personal one». « If I was of your presiding judge rabble, I would rely on the dice. On justice matter, it's the most practicable method, after all...»; one should «govern people such as they are, not such as one would they were».
“Brotteaux, when left to himself, kindled a little earthenware stove; then, while he busied himself with preparations for the Monk's and the Epicurean's meal, he read in his Lucretius and meditated on the conditions of human beings. As a sage and a philosopher, he was not surprised that these wretched creatures, silly playthings of the forces of nature, found themselves more often than not in absurd and painful situations; but he was weak and illogical enough to believe that the Revolutionaries were more wicked and more foolish than other men, thereby falling into the error of the metaphysician. At the same time he was no Pessimist and did not hold that life was altogether bad. He admired Nature in several of her departments, especially the celestial mechanism and physical love, and accommodated himself to the labors of life, pending the arrival of the day, which could not be far off, when he would have nothing more either to fear or to desire. He colored some dancing-dolls with painstaking care and made a Zerline that was very like Rose Thévenin. He liked the girl and his Epicureanism highly approved of the arrangement of the atoms of which she was composed. [...]
"Well, sir," said Brotteaux, "I cannot match your generosity and I am bound to tell you I cannot find in all the works of the Theologians one atom of good sense".[...]
"And your God, Father, what say you of His behavior in the present Revolution?"
- "I do not understand you, sir."
"Epicurus said: Either God wishes to hinder evil and cannot, or He can and does not wish to, or He cannot nor does he wish to, or He does wish to and can. If He wishes to and cannot, He is impotent; if He can and does not wish to, He is perverse; if He cannot nor does He wish to, He is impotent and perverse; if He does wish to and can, why does He not, tell me that, Father!"[...]
Brotteaux helped the Barnabite to get in and came and placed himself between the monk and the simple-hearted girl. "Sir," said the Père Longuemare [the Barnabite monk] to the Epicurean philosopher, "I ask you a favor; this God in whom you do not yet believe, pray to Him for me. It is far from sure you are not nearer to Him than I am myself; a moment can decide this. A second, and you may be called by the Lord to be His highly favored son. Sir, pray for me." While the wheels were grinding over the pavement of the long Faubourg Antoine, the monk was busy, with heart and lips, reciting the prayers of the dying. Brotteaux's mind was fixed on recalling the lines of the poet of nature: _Sic ubi non erimus_.... [De Rerum Natura III,838: "so, when we shall be no more, when there shall have come the parting of body and soul, by whose union we are made one, you may known that nothing at all will be able to happen to us, who then will be no more, or stir our feeling; no, not if earth shall be mingled with sea, and sea with sky". (Bailey's transl.)]. Bound as he was and shaken in the vile, jolting cart, he preserved his calm and even showed a certain solicitude to maintain an easy posture. At his side, Athenaïs, proud to die like the Queen of France, surveyed the crowd with haughty looks, and the old financier, noting as a connoisseur the girl's white bosom, was filled with regret for the light of day. [France, The Gods are Athirst passim]
His french version about Epicurean wording on death: «je suis, elle n'est pas ; elle est, je ne suis plus».
[edit] Trivia
Anatole France had a smallish brain of 1000cc -- about one-third smaller than the modern human average. "Though he wore the smallest hat in Paris," writes Robert Ardrey, "nothing prevented him from being one of the great French authors."
