The Sin of Monsieur Antoine (Complete)
9781465669704
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
I wrote the Sin of Monsieur Antoine in the country, during a season of tranquillity, outward and inward, such as seldom occurs in one's life. It was in 1845, a period when criticism of society, as it was, and dreams of an ideal society attained in the press a degree of freedom of development comparable to that of the eighteenth century. Some day, perhaps, people will find it difficult to believe the trivial but exceedingly characteristic fact I am about to mention. At that period, if one wished to be independent, to maintain directly or indirectly the boldest ideas opposed to the vices of the existing social organization and to give expression to the liveliest hopes of the philosophical sentiment, it was hardly possible to apply to the opposition newspapers. The most advanced of them unfortunately had not readers enough to give satisfactory publicity to the ideas one desired to put forth. The more moderate nourished a profound aversion for socialism, and, in the course of the last ten years of Louis-Philippe's reign, one of these organs of the reformist opposition, the most important by reason of its age and the number of its subscribers, did me the honor several times to ask me for a serial novel, always on the condition that it should contain nothing of a socialistic tendency. That condition was very difficult, perhaps impossible of fulfilment, to a mind absorbed by the sufferings and the needs of its generation. There are very few serious-minded artists who do not allow themselves to be influenced in their work by the threats of the present or the promises of the future, with more or less adroit circumlocution, with more or less effusion and enthusiasm. Moreover it was the time to say all that one thought, all that one believed. It was one's duty to do it, because it was possible. As the social war did not seem imminent, the monarchy, making no concessions to the needs of the people, seemed powerful enough to defy longer than it did the current of ideas. These ideas, at which only a small number of conservative minds had as yet taken fright, had really taken firm root only in a small number of observant and laborious minds. So long as they seemed to have no application to political actualities, the ruling power worried very little about theories and allowed every man to make one for himself, to publish his dream, to construct the future city innocently in his chimney corner, in the garden of his imagination. The conservative journals became therefore the refuge of the socialist novel. Eugène Sue published his in the Débats and the Constitutionnel. I published mine in the Constitutionnel and the Epoque. At about the same time the National was attacking the socialistic writers in its feuilletons, and overwhelming them with very bitter insults or very clever satire.
