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Exempted from active duty in the Franco-Prussian war, 27-year-old Anatole did special patrol in civilian clothes, showed his indifference, during one attack, by sitting atop a hill reading Virgil and making bets on how many shells would fall into the Marne. The bloody Commune which followed "threatened to disturb my serenity," so he fled to the country on a Belgian passport. A mild radical until the Commune (because his father was a Royalist and the revolutionary movement supplied good anecdotes), he thereafter wrote bitterly about everything connected with it. Particularly he was disgruntled at the Commune's having so disrupted the publishing business that he was forced to work on a Dictionary of Cooking. As France's contradictory personal life went, says Author Dargan, so went his views. Married at 33 to the daughter of a well-to-do, scholarly family, "a rare type of blonde, with 'marvelous' hands and feet," France was an easygoing, absentminded, not very ambitious husband.
In the famed salon of Jewish Mme de Caillavet he found the sympathy lacking at home. The hardheaded, chubby, henna-haired Madame set to work making him a Great Man. In the next 20 years, before he tired of her (four years before her death he married her housekeeper), Anatole was changed from a horse-faced "miserable librarian and scholar" into the suave literary lion of Paris, rich from the sale of never-ending editions of his books. Mistress, secretary, adviser, judge, publicity agent, Mme de Caillavet corrected his natural laziness by putting him on a production quota, acquired the knack of ghosting his articles. To importunate publishers she ordered: "Come to me next time. It is I who fulfill his promises." With a like forcefulness she silenced her husband's digs at the Master. With difficulty the Master eluded the watchful eye of Madame to get some much-needed relaxation with actresses and shopgirls.
Having whittled his political opinions to the point needed to enter the needle's eye of the French Academy, France showed a last burst of radical enthusiasm in support of Dreyfus. Thereafter his radicalism was of a free-lance kind which took as its motto that "men in general are worse than they seem to be." In a characteristic burst of gloom, the old voluptuary once confessed to Brousson: "There is not an unhappier creature in the whole universe than I! . . . I have never been happy—not an hour—not a day!"