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describe how badly off they were the moment before and how Rodolphe saved them from the blackest despair.
Now, it is true that Sue's public loved to have events repeated and confirmed over and over again and that every reader who wept over a character's misfortunes would in similar circumstances have behaved in the same way. But the reason for the 'Lord, how thirsty I was!' trick is apparently something else: this device allows the author to put the clock back so that the situation returns exactly to the status quo just before the change occurred. The transformation unties a knot, but removes nothing essential (the rope is not changed so to speak). Balance and order are disturbed by the informative violence of the coup de théâtre, but are reestablished on the same emotional bases as before. Above all, the characters do not 'evolve'. No one 'evolves' in Les Mystères. The character who undergoes conversion was basically good to begin with; the villain dies impenitent. Nothing happens that could possibly cause anyone any anxiety. The reader is comforted either because hundreds of marvelous things happen or because these events do not alter the up-and-down course of things. The sea continues to ebb and flow, except that for an instant there has been weeping, joy, suffering, or pleasure. The narrative sets in motion a series of devices for gratifying the reader, the most completely satisfactory and reassuring of which is that all remains in order, even those changes that take place in the realm of the imagination: Marie ascends the throne, Cinderella leaves her hearth. Nevertheless, she dies, from excess of scruple.
Within this mechanism one is free to dream; Rudolph is at the corner of the street for every readerit is enough to stand and wait. It has already been noted that the year of Sue's death was the same that saw the publication of Madame Bovary. And Madame Bovary is the critical account of the life of a woman who read 'consolatory novels' in the style of Sue, from which she learned to wait for something that would never happen. It would be unfair to regard Sue the man and Sue the writer only in the symbolic light of this merciless dialectic. But it is useful to see the problem of the commercial novel, from Sue's day to our own, threatened by the obscurantist shadow of 'consolation'.
5.3. Conclusion
The whole of the foregoing examination represents a method of study employed by one particular reader relying on the 'cultivated' codes that were supposedly shared by the author and his contemporary critics. We know perfectly well that other readers in Sue's day did not use this key to decipher the book. They did not grasp its reformist implications, and from the total message only certain more obvious meanings filtered

 
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