EMILE'S FIRST MEETING WITH GILBERTE.
A fresh young voice was singing, or rather humming, at a little distance, one of those sweet melodies, which are peculiar to the country. And the châtelain's daughter, the bachelor's child, whose mother's name was a mystery to the whole neighborhood, appeared at the corner of a clump of eglantine, as lovely as the loveliest wild flower of that charming solitude.
[INTRODUCTION]
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.
The Epoque, a journal which had a very brief life, but which began by surpassing in ardor all the conservative and absolutist organs of the moment, was the frame wherein I was given absolute liberty to publish a socialistic novel. On all the blank walls of Paris was placarded in huge letters: Read the Epoque! Read the Sin of Monsieur Antoine!
The following year, as we were wandering through the moors of Crozant and among the ruins of Châteaubrun, a rustic field in which my pen had always taken delight, a Parisian friend of mine called out facetiously to the half-civilized shepherds of those solitudes: "Have you read the Epoque? Have you read the Sin of Monsieur Antoine?" And as they fled, terrified by those incomprehensible words, he said to me with a laugh: "How evident it is that these socialistic novels go to the heads of the country people!"