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Novel Sylvestre Bonnard, an elderly and highly esteemed scholar, encounters unexpected problems when he embarks upon a search for an ancient ecclesiastical literary document that takes him from Paris to Sicily and then into his own life history. For the sake of justice and love, he ends up committing acts that at best are of doubtful legality. --- With "The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard," Anatole France (1844-1924) wrote a novel that is both clever and wise and in the manner of the great masters of literary style - a book that is full of suspense from beginning to end. Anatole France became known after the publication of Le crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881) where he looked back at the 18th century as a golden age. Its protagonist, skeptical old scholar Sylvester Bonnard, embodied France's own personality. The novel was praised for its elegant prose and won him a prize from the French Academy. In La rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque (1893) Anatole France ridiculed belief in the occult; and in Les opinions de Jerome Coignard (1893), France captures the atmosphere of the fin de siècle. France's later works include L'Île des Pingouins (Penguin Island) (1908) which satirizes human nature by depicting the transformation of penguins into humans - after the animals have been baptized in error by the nearsighted Abbot Mael. La Revolte des Anges (The Revolt of the Angels) (1914), often considered France's most profound novel, tells the story of Arcade, the guardian angel of Maurice d'Esparvieu, who falls in love, joins the revolutionary movement of angels, and toward the end realizes that the overthrow of God is meaningless unless in ourselves and in ourselves alone we attack and destroy Ialdabaoth. In the 1920s France's writings were put on the index of Libri prohibiti (Forbidden Books).
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