Jocaste et le chat maigre Reading Order

Jocaste et le chat maigre (1879) by Anatole France is his first major prose fiction, a pair of novellas that introduced the ironic intelligence and the precise psychological observation that would mark all his subsequent work. Jocaste is a tragic short novel about a woman who discovers the truth about her father's and husband's moral failures and is destroyed by the knowledge: France's first major study of a woman's consciousness responding to the moral failures of the men around her. Le Chat maigre is a comic novella about a group of young men in a Paris studio — painters and would-be artists — who form a bohemian commune organized around the cult of a thin cat (the 'lean cat' of the title), and whose artistic ambitions are gently satirized through the contrast between their aesthetic pretensions and their social reality. The two novellas are deliberately paired as a tragic and a comic study of the same theme: the gap between the ideal (Jocaste's husband, the young artists) and the reality. France's ironic method — the sympathetic observation of the distance between human pretension and human reality — is already fully formed in this first major work, and the two novellas together constitute the best introduction to his early style before the more ambitious novels.