Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard Reading Order

Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881) by Anatole France was the novel that made his reputation and remains his most beloved work — a gentle, ironic, profoundly humane portrait of an elderly Parisian scholar who rescues a young girl from a wretched boarding school and in doing so commits the 'crime' of the title (abduction of a ward). Sylvestre Bonnard is a member of the Académie française, a specialist in medieval manuscripts, a man of exquisite literary culture and complete impracticality, who keeps a diary of his days in Paris and his journey to Sicily in search of a manuscript. He is one of the great benevolent eccentrics in French fiction — a figure in the tradition of the scholarly recluse who turns out to be the most morally clear person in the novel precisely because his scholarship has given him perspective on human pettiness. France's irony is gentle throughout: Bonnard's 'crime' of rescuing Jeanne from a boarding school that exploits her is indeed technically illegal, and France uses the gap between the law's technicalities and moral common sense to make a point about the relationship between legal systems and justice. The novel is written in a prose of crystalline clarity and wit, and it established France's reputation as the heir to Voltaire — the French writer who combined erudition with irony and humanity in the classic tradition.