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Page 138
cence, not by acquiring a new, independent conscience that can plan life for itself.
Madame d'Harville's education required a subtler solution: Rodolphe urges her on to social activity, but this choice must appear credible in the eyes of the general public. So Clémence is made to give herself to the poor because charity constitutes for her a pleasure, a noble and subtle kind of joy. It can be enjoyable to do good. 16 The poor are to become the rich man's diversion.
Ferrand's punishment, too, turns out to be just what is expected. After licentious living it is of lust unappeased that he dies. He stole money from widows and orphans, only to see this money restored to them by the will Rodolphe forces him to make, bequeathing his goods for the founding of a paupers' bank.
Here we see the main features of Sue's, alias Rodolphe's, social doctrine. Its chief manifestation is the model farm at Bouquenval, the perfect example of successful paternalism. The reader has only to look again at part 3, chapter 6. The farm is an ideal phalanstery that nevertheless functions according to the decrees of a master who comes to the aid of all who find themselves without work. The paupers' bank, with related theories on the reform of pawnbrokers, is similarly inspired: seeing that poverty exists and that the workman can find himself out of work, we must set up systems of providential help to supply him with money in times of unemployment. When he gets work he will pay this back. ''During the times he has work," as Marx and Engels put it in their commentary, "he gives back to me what he had from me during his unemployment." Sue's plans for the prevention of crime, and for the reduction of legal costs for the indigent, proceed along the same lines. So, too, does his project for an honest citizens' police force, which, just as the law keeps the wicked under observation, arrests them and brings them to judgment, would keep a close watch on the good, 'denounce' them to the community for their virtuous actions, and summon them to the public courts, where their good deeds would receive due recognition and reward. The basis of Sue's ideology is this: to try to discover what we can do for the humble (by means of brotherly collaboration between classes) while leaving the present structure of society unchanged.
That this ideology has a right to be considered for its political merits quite outside the sphere of the serial novel is both obvious and well known. Whether it has anything to do with the pleasure the novel affords us is a question that should be looked into more closely, and we have already supplied the means of doing so. Once again it is a question of reassuring the reader by showing him that the dramatic situation is both posed and capable of solution, yet in such a way that he does not cease to identify himself with the situation described in the novel as a whole.

 
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