Eugène Sue

The first new translation in over a century of the brilliant epic novel that inspired Les Miserables. From July 1842 through October 1843, Parisians rushed to the newspaper each week for the latest installment of Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris, one of France's first serial novels. The suspenseful story of Rodolphe, a magnetic hero of noble heart and shadowy origins, played out over ninety issues, garnering wild popularity and leading many to call it the most widely read novel of the 19th century. Sue's novel created the city mystery genre and inspired a raft of successors, including Les Miserables and The Count of Monte Cristo. The intricate melodrama of The Mysteries of Paris unfolds around a Paris where the fortunes of the rich and the poor are helplessly tangled, despite the vast gulf between them. In the Cite, a seedy neighborhood where criminals gather, Rodolphe encounters a young prostitute of breathtaking purity who goes by the name Songbird. He saves her from an attack by a ruffian called the Slasher, setting off the dominoes of an epic narrative traversing the ranks of French society. As Rodolphe pursues his own mysterious quest for redemption, a circle of characters from all walks of life forms around him-some following his every move and others gravitating to his boundless generosity. From the nefarious pairing of the Schoolmaster and the Owl, a hardened criminal and an unfathomably cruel street merchant, to Morel, a gem-cutter so virtuous he refuses to steal even the smallest ruby to feed his starving family, the lines between good and evil in Sue's Paris are always clear, but never unyielding. Though the immense literary and historical resonance of Sue's magnum opus has been for years overshadowed by Hugo's achievement, this stunning new translation is a revelation, promising to bring the unmitigated pleasures of Sue's cliffhangers and criminals to a new century of readers. Sensational, steamy, tightly-plotted, pulpy, proto-socialist, heartbreaking, and riveting, The Mysteries of Paris is doubtless one of the most entertaining and influential works to emerge from the 19th century.

Este romance monumental, originalmente publicado em forma de folhetim entre 1842 e 1843, mergulha nos bastidores sombrios da capital francesa. Com uma escrita vibrante e cheia de suspense, Eugene Sue constroi uma galeria de personagens intensos e contrastantes:

Translator: Daniel De Leon

Translator: Daniel De Leon

Translator: Daniel De Leon

Translator: Daniel De Leon

Translator: Daniel De Leon

Translator: Tomás Orts-Ramos

Translator: Daniel De Leon

Translator: Daniel De Leon

The scheme of this great work of Sues was stupendously ambitiousand the author did not fall below the ideal that he pursued. His was the purpose of producing a comprehensive "universal history," dating from the beginning of the present era down to his own days. But the history that he proposed to sketch was not to be a work for closet study. It was to be a companion in the stream of actual, every-day life and struggle, with an eye especially to the successive struggles of the successively ruled with the successively ruling classes. In the execution of his design, Sue conceived a plan that was as brilliant as it was poeticwithal profoundly philosophic. One family, the descendants of a Gallic chief named Joel, typifies the oppressed; one family, the descendants of a Frankish chief and conqueror named Neroweg, typifies the oppressor; and across and adown the ages, the successive struggles between oppressors and oppressedthe history of civilizationis thus represented in a majestic allegory. In the execution of this superb plan a thread was necessary to connect the several epochs with one another, to preserve the continuity requisite for historic accuracy, and, above all, to give unity and point to the silent lesson taught by the unfolding drama. Sue solved the problem by an ingenious schemea series of stories, supposedly written from age to age, sometimes at shorter, other times at longer intervals, by the descendants of the ancestral type of the oppressed, narrating their special experience and handing the supplemented chronicle down to their successors from generation to generation, always accompanied with some emblematic relic, that constitutes the first name of each story.

Kidnapping, murder, and prostitution: Eugene Sues The Mysteries of Paris takes readers into the squalid working-class neighborhoods and underworld of Paris in 1838. Sinister plans are made in the grimy dive bars where the citys criminals meet, while family dramas play out in the chic salons of the aristocratic upper class, but the facade must be maintained at all costs. The juggernaut that is Paris, with its narrowness, its filth and its omnipresent crimes, brutalizes people. And in the midst of this swamp of the seedy alleys of the urban jungle, a strange savior appears out of nowhere to stand by the helpless and disenfranchised to bring the wicked to justice.In a total of nearly 2000 pages, a richly detailed and colorful picture of everyday life in Paris in the mid-19th century unfolds. Dozens of characters from different social classes and their stories are interwoven with the main plot thread of the work. Sue combines elements of the detective story, the social novel, and melodrama to create a visually powerful epic of a bygone era, whose revenge motif and intriguing intricacies are at times reminiscent of Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo, which was inspired by Sue.The Mysteries of Paris appeared almost daily as a serialized novel between June 1842 and October 1843 in the Journal des Debats. The newspapers publication figures literally exploded, first book versions quickly appeared on the market, and the novel was translated into numerous languages. Sue received numerous letters from enthusiastic readers and critics. He took some of the suggestions they contained into account for the continuation of the story. Today, this tremendous novel has almost fallen into oblivion.This is the sixth of six volumes of the monumental work.