The Sin of Monsieur Antoine, Volume 1

Excerpt: '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.'