Le Lys rouge Reading Order

Le Lys rouge (The Red Lily, 1894) by Anatole France is the most polished of his novels, a portrait of the Parisian intellectual and social world in the early 1890s seen through a love affair between the married aristocrat Thérèse Martin-Bellème and the sculptor Jacques Dechartre, set against the backdrop of Florence and the French political scandal of the Panama affair. France's achievement in Le Lys rouge is the combination of psychological precision (the love affair is analyzed with the same ironic detachment that he brings to his historical and philosophical novels) and social observation (the Parisian salon world, the artist colony in Florence, the intersection of politics and society in the Third Republic) in a form that reads as a society novel but thinks as philosophy. The ironic detachment that is France's most characteristic quality — the sense that the author is simultaneously sympathetic to his characters and amused by them — is at its finest in Le Lys rouge: Thérèse and Dechartre are treated with genuine tenderness while being observed with the precision of a naturalist. The title, from the lily in Dante that France uses as an epigraph, is both an emblem of passionate love and of the Florentine art world that the novel uses as its social setting. Le Lys rouge was the novel that made Anatole France the most celebrated French writer of his generation, eventually winning him the Nobel Prize in 1921.