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Page 128
the same proletariat he describes in his book. As public approval mounts ever higher, Sue is gradually won over by the very sentiments he has himself invoked. As Bory has remarked, ''The popular novel (popular in its aim) as it becomes popular (in terms of its success) soon becomes popular in its ideas and its form." 6
In the third part of the work, Sue is already proposing models of social reform (the farm at Bouquenval); in the fifth, the action slows down and gives place to long, moralizing lectures and 'revolutionary' propositions (though, as will be seen, these are really only reformist); as the work draws to a close, the tirades become more and more frequent, almost intolerably so. As the action and the essayistic perorations develop, Sue's new ideological position becomes clear: Les Mystères reveals to the reader the iniquitous social conditions which out of poverty produce crimea mystery with the veil torn away. If this misery can be alleviatedif the prisoner can be reeducated, the virtuous girl rescued from the wealthy seducer, the honest workman released from the debtors' prison, and all given a chance of redemption and helped in a spirit of Christian brotherhood towards reformthen the world will become a better place. Evil is only a social ill. The book, which might at first have been entitled The Gangsters' Epic, ends up as the Epic of the Unfortunate Workman and A Manual of Redemption. It is clear that this outlook does not appear 'revolutionary' in the sense in which we understand that word since the advent of Marxism; but even so these views aroused scandalized reactions in the conservative press in Paris, though other, more malicious critics perceived the bourgeois limits of Sue's supposed socialism.
In one of his Marginalia, written after Les Mystères had been translated into English, Edgar Allan Poe notes that the philosophical motives ascribed to Sue are in the highest degree absurd. Sue's first, and really his only, care was to write an exciting and therefore saleable story. His tirades (implicit and explicit) to improve society, and so on, are a mere stratagem, very common in authors who hope to impart a note of dignity or utilitarianism to their pages by gilding their licentiousness. Poe's criticism cannot be called 'leftist'; the American poet confines himself to pointing out a falseness in the tone of the book and to attributing to its author intentions which remain unconfessed.
A far more penetrating, and ideologically more apposite, criticism was made of Sue in the same year by Belinskij. After a rapid survey of lower-class conditions in Western industrial civilization, Belinskij opens fire: Eugene Sue was a man of fortune whose first and foremost intention was the very lucrative one of speculating, quite literally, at the expense of the people. A respectable bourgeois in the full sense of the term and a petit-bourgeois constitutional philistineif he could have become a deputy, he would have been one such as we find everywhere today. When

 
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