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!"