Le Livre de mon ami

At various points in his life, Anatole France returned to and expanded his childhood and youth memories, of his parents, his teachers, his schoolfellows. “When it came to talking about himself, he was inexhaustible” (J. Suffel, A. France). Pierre Nozière is the most autobiographical of his characters, the one who, book after book, tells us about the author of Thaïs.

Fragments of the Livre de Pierre, later collected under the title Le Livre de mon ami and published by Calmann Lévy in 1885, had first appeared in various periodicals — La Revue bleue, Jeune France, etc. — between 1882 and 1885, publications to which France had access and, in some cases, actively contributed.

Le Livre de mon ami is thus the first of France’s volumes of memoirs, published in 1885; it was followed by Pierre Nozière in 1899 (Lemerre) and finally Le Petit Pierre in 1918, again with Calmann Lévy. Anatole appears under the name Pierre, his father, the bookseller France, under that of the doctor Nozière: “I will tell you what the restless autumn sky recalls to me every year […] what I see when I cross the Luxembourg Gardens […]. What I see then in that garden is a little fellow who, hands in his pockets and satchel on his back, goes off to school hopping like a sparrow. […] It is the shadow of the self I was twenty-five years ago. […] It was, on the whole, better than the other selves I have had since losing that one.” (Le Livre de mon ami, p. 139).