title: The Queen Pedauque
author: France, Anatole
description: Anatole France spent his childhood around his father's bookstore in France. As an adult he became a librarian and author. France received a prize from the French Academy for his novel The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881). In 1901, France wrote about the Dreyfus affair in Monsieur Bergeret. In 1908, he published Penguin Island, a humorous satire about penguins changed into humans after being baptized in error by the nearsighted Abbot Mael. The Queen Pedauque is a philosophical romance centering around an eighteenth-century tavern in Paris where the misfortune-plagued abbé Coignard becomes tutor to the tavern keeper's son, infusing him with doses of liberal humanism on the one hand and profound piety on the other.