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The Mysteries of Paris

By EUGENE SUE Condensation by SARA WARE BASSETT TO interpret justly the works of Eugene Sue, one must not forget to take into consideration the epoch at which they won their place in world literature. When Sue was born the novel was still a comparatively new product. There had, it is true, been books before its advent, for the invention of printing had put reading-matter within the reach of the people; but until fiction made its appearance most of the material published had been of a religious trend, consisting of lives of the saints and treatises on theology and science. Even then such volumes were costly, to say nothing of their being of far too ponderous a nature to answer the cravings of a public scantily educated and desirous for entertainment at a time when amusements were few. Therefore, when out of this arid literary waste the novel sprung into being, we can easily picture the eagerness with which the hungering masses fell upon it. Here, at last, was something human and within the scope of the every-day man's understanding; here, in fascinating form, were presented not only characters from the life with which he was familiar, but also adventures in those mystic realms of romance that he had imagined. It was like water to the thirsty!

Hence, if, when reading the very early novels, or even those of the later decades to which Sue belonged, we are conscious of stilted dialogue and melodramatic and improbable situations, let us remember that the writers of this era were to no small extent pioneers in a sparsely trodden wilderness of art; and that when "the world was so new and all" in literary development it is a marvel that their handiwork has endured for so many years. Sue's Mysteries of Paris penned in 1842, seems touched with the fires of everlasting youth. Indeed, it must possess the charm of universal appeal or it would never have held its place for almost a century. When we consider how few of our present-day novels survive a second season, we are forced to doff our caps to this artist of the past who, like Stevenson, so well merits the sobriquet of "Tusitala, a Teller of Tales," and the secret of whose spell lies in the eternal child in us answering to the sorceries of a master story-teller. The book in question is a labyrinth of exciting and dramatic happenings, which, cleverly woven together, embody the author's unique philosophy that the quest for good may be made quite as seductive a crusade as the quest for evil, the only difference lying in the goal toward which one turns his steps. Certainly the story bears out this theory, for we are swept along by the magician's cunning page after page, chapter after chapter, until his creative resources seem limitless. Never for an instant does our interest lag. When the book is finished we feel that, had Sue so ordained, could have evolved just as many more plots with an equal degree of ease.