The novelists themselves are a small class working under immense temptations. They live in Paris, where life is terribly expensive, rents enormous, habits luxurious. It is part of their business to see society, and that entails an expenditure above the ordinary gains of quiet unsensational literature. The temptation to gain more money is, in such a situation, almost irresistible. Money is to be earned by exciting the reader. Writers for the populace do this chiefly by murders; but murders are not so attractive to the richer and more refined classes as adventures of pleasure and sensuality. The novelist works for his public, and enjoys both a world-wide notoriety and a handsome income. The most successful novelists describe the pleasures of luxury and vice, and the excitement to be derived from their pursuit. They are simply acute tradesmen, like their publishers, who supply what is in demand. [Sidenote: Why People read Novels.] [Sidenote: Dull Lives.] [Sidenote: An English old Maid.] Now with regard to the second proposition, that the readers of immoral stories must themselves be immoral, observation of actual cases entirely fails to confirm it. People read these stories because they feel dull, and seek the interest of exciting situations. Here is a case well known to me. A lady lives in a very out-of-the-way country house and sees very little society; so reading is her only resource. Fiction is naturally an important part of her reading, and as she is not a linguist she is confined to the works of French authors and a few translations. In this way she has read a good deal about adultery, but her own life is unimpeachable. In like manner, for the sake of a little excitement, an English old maid always read about the murders of the day, and was accurately informed about the horrible details; yet she never murdered anybody, nor even betrayed any homicidal impulse. [Sidenote: Cosmopolitan Audience of French Novelists.] [Sidenote: Daudet well known in London.] [Sidenote: Fashionable Rage for French Novels in England.] [Sidenote: Not all Frenchwomen Novel-Readers.] [Sidenote: Pious Women. Girls.] [Sidenote: Statistics of Novel-Reading near Paris.]