The Seven Wives of Bluebeard

ANATOLE FRANCE (1844-1924) was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. France is also widely believed to be the model for narrator Marcel's literary idol Bergotte in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. He became famous with the novel Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard [1881]. The novel was praised for its elegant prose. France's later works include L'Île des Pingouins [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. Ironic and skeptical, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and true Gallic temperament".