Anatole France, born in Paris as Anatole François Thibault, was a French novelist and poet. He grew up among books above his father’s bookshop at Quai Malaquais. Anatole France read copiously throughout his life, but was less serious about his formal education. He was an average student at a private Jesuit school – where he cultivated a strong aversion to the Catholic faith – and later at university where he read literature and philosophy. Instead of obeying his father and becoming a civil servant, France worked as a bookshop assistant, teacher and librarian, and in 1876 he was appointed librarian for the French Senate (where he allegedly read more than he worked). Also in the 1870s, he began to publish literary criticism in Le Temps at the same time as he became acquainted with the Parnassian poets and with Madame de Caillavet, who became his lover and his muse. She has been attributed with the fact that Anatole France, despite his idle nature, wrote some sixty books because she offered the ideal conditions for him to work in. France was inconsolable when she died in 1910. A few years later he withdrew to a house near Tours, where he lived until his death in 1924.