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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Anatole France was so exclusively French that one hardly expects to find a foreigner in his intimate circle. His address books list very few aliens. Carlos Blacker is the only one of these who is listed four times. We have some forty letters from France to Blacker and an equal number from Blacker to France between 1915 and 1921. There were undoubtedly more. Their acquaintance dated back a number of years before these letters begin. The correspondence shows that France was capable of unexpected warmth at a time of life when friendships are not easily formed. France was seventy and Blacker fifty-five when associations of the war period deepened their relationship. By 1917 France was ending his letters with such expressions as: “A vous tendrement,” “Je vous embrasse tendrement.”
1 The author is grateful to Dr. C. P. Blacker, the son of Carlos Blacker, and to Monsieur Lucien Psichari, the grandson of Anatole France, for their help and permission to use the letters of Carlos Blacker and Anatole France; he is further indebted to Robert Dell's daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Blelloch, for permission to use Dell's letters and his unpublished work, Anatole France as I Knew Him.
The author thanks M. Jacques Suffel and M. Marcel Thomas of the Bibliothèque Nationale for their assistance in examining materials in that library.
2 Blacker's first letter, 18 June 1915, refers to one which is missing. When Blacker moved to Paris in November of that year the ship in which his faithful housekeeper followed was sunk. She perished, and many letters were lost. In the winter of 1915–16 Blacker was seeing France in Paris which explains the absence of letters from that period. A few letters appear to have been lost after that.
3 Letter of Alfred Loisy to Carlos Blacker, 11 Oct. 1917.
4 Joseph Reinach, Histoire de l'affaire Dreyfus, iii (Paris, 1903), 294, 295, note 3.
5 I shall refer to the correspondence by mentioning the date only. If my text does not show who was the writer of a letter I shall add AF-CB, meaning Anatole France to Carlos Blacker, or CB-AF.
6 France bought the Villa Said in 1894. Pierre Calmettes, La grande passion d'Anatole France (Paris, 1929), p. 146.
7 France married her in 1920. Jacques Suffel, Anatole France (Paris, 1946), pp. 314–315, 359.
8 Letter to France of the deputy Gaston Thomson, 25 Nov. 1916.
9 France wrote that the project was organized with three objectives: (1) Application of radium therapy to patients; (2) Popularization of the knowledge of methods and treatments; (3) Therapeutic and biological research.
10 C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, The History of the Great War, 1914–1918 (Oxford, 1934), pp. 166–167.
11 Liddell Hart, The War in Outline, 1914–1918 (London, 1936), pp. 69, 179–180.
12 In the First World War Captain Carlos Paton Blacker was twice commended in dispatches, wounded, and awarded the Military Cross. After the war he studied medicine, specialized in psychiatry, and became one of England's distinguished physicians. He returned to military service in the Second World War, refusing promotion to a rank higher than that of captain in order to be the Resident Medical Officer in his old battalion of the Coldstream Guards.
13 Kent Forster, Failures of the Peace (Philadelphia, 1941), p. 109.
14 Les Nations, 6 July 1917, p. 61.
15 Ibid., 15 June 1917, pp. 2, 6–7, 8; 29 June 1917, p. 33; 13 July 1917, p. 69.
16 Ibid., 27 July 1917, p. 98; Robert Dell, Anatole France as I Knew Him (unpublished manuscript).
17 Louis Marchand, L'offensive morale (Paris, 1920), pp. iv, ix, xiv, 221–225.
18 Dell, op. cit.
19 A telegram, from the Dells to AF 12 Oct. 1920 congratulating him on his wedding, shows that the breach had been closed before that date. In Anatole France as I Knew Him Dell writes of seeing France only once after his expulsion and of being received by him with open arms: “There was not a trace left of the unfortunate difference between us in 1917.”
20 Forster, op. cit., p. 99, note 45.
21 Anatole France, Vers les temps meilleurs (Paris, 1906), iii, 10–26, 47–53; Michael Florinsky, Russia, a History and Interpretation, ii (New York, 1953), 1171–82.
22 Florinsky, op. cit., pp. 1177, 1426.
23 Ibid., 1449–50.
24 Cambridge Magazine, 27 July 1918.
25 Quoted from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 19 July 1918, in the Cambridge Magazine, 3 August 1918.
26 Quoted from Le Populaire of 7 Sept. 1919, in the Cambridge Magazine, 11 Oct. 1919.
27 Pierre Kovalesky, Manuel d'histoire russe (Paris, 1948), p. 329.
28 Jean Maxe, Anthologie des défaitistes (Paris, 1925), i, 375–376.
29 Vérité, 30 March 1918, quoted by the Cambridge Magazine, 4 May 1918.
30 Maurice Gaffiot, Les Théories d'Anatole France sur l'organisation sociale de son temps (Paris, 1928), pp. 145, 147.
31 Anatole France, Œuvres complètes, xiii (Paris, 1927), 527–528.
32 Quoted by Suffel, op. cit., p. 357.
33 Nicolas Ségur, “Conversations avec Anatole France,” Revue de France, iii (1 May 1927), 44–45.
34 Suffel, op. cit., p. 363
35 France and Blacker never met again after the winter of 1916 although they fully expected to. In June 1918 France thought of visiting Blacker at Dinard (CB-AF, 25 June '18). The Blackers were among the few people invited to attend France's wedding with Emma Laprévotte in October of that year. Mrs. Blacker's poor health interfered.
The quotations from the unpublished letters of Anatole France are authorized by Calmann-Lévy.