A Mummer's Tale

""'No need to pity her, ' he said. 'She will have all that she can wish; she will succeed; she will be wealthy. She is a selfish little jade, and a woman who is selfish can get anything she likes. But for people with hearts there's nothing left but to hang a stone round one's neck and throw oneself into the river. But, I too, I shall go far. I, too, shall climb high. I, too, will be a selfish hound.' . . . "

""Conscious of physical distress on going away from her, he took five or six turns under the dark, deserted arcades of the Odon, went down the steps into the night, and turned up the Rue de Mdicis.""

Back in the 1950s, the Irish government banned Anatole France's "A Mummer's Tale" for immorality -- but we think you'll want to read the novel. It was for good reason that France won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1921 -- the man could write, he had a thing or three to say, and he knew how to write his tales in compelling and delightful ways. A noted man of letters, he was for good reason a leading figure of turn-of-the-twentieth-century French literary life.