‘Conrad's cult of Anatole France was not a case of artistic love at first sight, but a maturing intellectual appreciation’, writes Paul Kirschner, who was one of the first critics to examine the close relationship between Conrad and his famous contemporary. Conrad's contact with France appears to have begun in 1894 with a reading of Le Lys rouge (1894) which at that time left him unmoved; slowly but decisively, his commitment to France seems to have strengthened during the period 1900–8 when he read virtually all of France's writings, wrote two reviews of his fiction (in 1904 and 1908) and was even keen to send the French author a copy of his first review (CL, III, p. 405); with Chance (1914) and Victory (1915) France still seems a decisive living presence in Conrad's consciousness.

Unlike the impact of Flaubert and Maupassant which occurred at the very beginning of Conrad's career and constitutes something of a case of discipleship, France's influence was of a later date, slower in effect, and more diffuse. It is not for that reason of lesser importance, but simply different and more difficult to describe. For one thing, it is the intellectual quality of France's work that attracted Conrad in 1904 when, in his review of ‘Crainquebille’, he stressed that the ‘proceedings of France's thought compel our intellectual admiration’ (NLL, pp. 39–40).