It is followed by six more short chapters, concise and full, delicate and complete like the petals of a flower, presenting to us the Adventure of Crainquebille—­Crainquebille before the justice—­An Apology for the President of the Tribunal—­Of the Submission of Crainquebille to the Laws of the Republic—­Of his Attitude before the Public Opinion, and so on to the chapter of the Last Consequences.  We see, created for us in his outward form and innermost perplexity, the old man degraded from his high estate of a law-abiding street-hawker and driven to insult, really this time, the majesty of the social order in the person of another police-constable.  It is not an act of revolt, and still less of revenge.  Crainquebille is too old, too resigned, too weary, too guileless to raise the black standard of insurrection.  He is cold and homeless and starving.  He remembers the warmth and the food of the prison.  He perceives the means to get back there.  Since he has been locked up, he argues with himself, for uttering words which, as a matter of fact he did not say, he will go forth now, and to the first policeman he meets will say those very words in order to be imprisoned again.  Thus reasons Crainquebille with simplicity and confidence.  He accepts facts.  Nothing surprises him.  But all the phenomena of social organisation and of his own life remain for him mysterious to the end.  The description of the policeman in his short cape and hood, who stands quite still, under the light of a street lamp at the edge of the pavement shining with the wet of a rainy autumn evening along the whole extent of a long and deserted thoroughfare, is a perfect piece of imaginative precision.  From under the edge of the hood his eyes look upon Crainquebille, who has just uttered in an uncertain voice the sacramental, insulting phrase of the popular slang—­Mort aux vaches!  They look upon him shining in the deep shadow of the hood with an expression of sadness, vigilance, and contempt.

He does not move.  Crainquebille, in a feeble and hesitating voice, repeats once more the insulting words.  But this policeman is full of philosophic superiority, disdain, and indulgence.  He refuses to take in charge the old and miserable vagabond who stands before him shivering and ragged in the drizzle.  And the ruined Crainquebille, victim of a ridiculous miscarriage of justice, appalled at this magnanimity, passes on hopelessly down the street full of shadows where the lamps gleam each in a ruddy halo of falling mist.

M. Anatole France can speak for the people.  This prince of the Senate is invested with the tribunitian power.  M. Anatole France is something of a Socialist; and in that respect he seems to depart from his sceptical philosophy.  But as an illustrious statesman, now no more, a great prince too, with an ironic mind and a literary gift, has sarcastically remarked in one of his public speeches:  “We are all Socialists now.”  And in the sense in which