VIII
I would guess that I have earned a million dollars in the course of my life; ninety-nine per cent of it came from writing and one per cent from lecturing. First it was the half-dime novels; then it became serious books, and my troubles and the readers’ began. Always I had been advocating unpopular opinions, swimming against the current. I can hear the voice of my dear mother, long since departed from this earth, pleading with me not to make things so hard for myself but to write things to please other people—and incidentally help my dear mother so that she would not have to wear the discarded clothes of her well-to-do sisters.
But there was something in me that drove me to write what I believed and what other people ought to believe: always something unpopular, something difficult; a play about Marie Antoinette, for example—what could be more unlikely from Upton Sinclair, or less likely to please his readers? “Upton Sinclair just loves Marie Antoinette,” said the New Republic, jovially.
No, I didn’t exactly love her, but I pitied poor human creatures in their dreadful predicaments. A girl child had been raised and trained to believe that she was destined by Almighty God to rule over millions of people—or at least to sit on the throne beside the ruler and bring a future ruler into the world; and she was destined instead to be dragged from her throne and hauled through avenues packed with screaming, cursing people crowding in to see her head chopped off upon a high public platform. Who was she really, and what did she make of it—she and the God whom she worshiped.
She had a lover, the Swedish Count Fersen, quite proper according to the customs of her time. I found that pitiful love story touching, and I think I wrote a good play; but it would have been expensive to produce, and no one here or in Paris has come forward.
I did my homework on it, as I always do, and the book was highly praised. There sticks in my mind a letter from an old gentleman who took exception to my interpretation of the revolutionary slogan, “Les aristocrats à la lanterne!” There was a French song at the time that I translated, “The aristocrats, they shall hang from lanterns”; the old gentleman found that an amusing blunder. But in the music room of the Pasadena Library I had dug up a book of those historic revolutionary chants, and had found a footnote explaining that in those days at street and highway intersections high posts had been set up and chains strung across, so that a lantern could be hung above the center of the roads. It was literally true that the aristocrats had been hung from lanterns.