MARX, SUE, REALISM 85 from prostitution. In his polemic Marx exposes at two levels. On the one hand he shows that the speculative straitjacket of Hegelian construction that Szeliga thrusts over the Sue's story amounts in effect to a mystification of those aspects of urban reality that Sue was trying to reveal, albeit for the curiosity of the reader. The ideological blinkers of this "provincial pastor", as Marx calls him, had led him simply to misunderstand the structure of the novel. At the more important level Marx exposes the spurious realism of Sue as itself a mystification of social reality. Sue lets a worker exclaim: "If the rich only knew! If the rich only knew! The misfortune is that they do not know what poverty is." Szeliga had approvingly quoted this as expressing the secret of the opposition between rich and poor! Once the rich were adequately informed they would do away with the ills of society. It was not a question of the social results of the production relations but one of lack of information. Marx writes; "Mr Szeliga does not know that Sue commits an anachronism out of courtesy to French bourgeoisie when he puts the motto of burghers of Louis XIV's time 'Ah! si Ie roi Ie savait!9 (Oh! if king only knew it!) in a modefied form: 'Ah! si Ie richele savait!9 (Oh! if the rich only knew it!) into the mouth of the working man Morel who lived at the time of the 'Chartre verite.9 (true charter) (of Louis-Philippe's time). In England and France at least such a naive relation between rich and poor has ceased to exist. There the scientific representatives of wealh, the economists, have spread very detailed understanding of the physical and moral misery of poverty. They have made up for that by proving poverty must remain because the present state of things must remain. In their solitude they have even calculated the proportions in which the poor must be reduced in number by deaths for the good of the rich and for their own welfare."3 Apart from the ridiculous schemes for economic uplift Prince Rudolph initiates, his major contribution to the amelioration of the ills of the poor is to save their souls. He delivers them up to Christian dogma. This religious salvaging in the interests of salvation that Sue asks his readers to approve and stomach is in fact, as Marx shows, an astonishing exercise in hypocrisy and brutality. Rudolph transforms the vital knifer Le Chourineur into a "moral bulldog" whose only function is to die for his master Rudolph. In the transformation of Fleur de Marie from a lovable human individual into a slave, a bonded slave of the Christian conscience of sin, Marx sees the most significant example of apologia and hypocrisy in Sue. Before her Christian transformation Sue portrays Marie as a vital person. "She is good because she has never caused suffering to anybody, she has always been human towards her inhuman 3 Marx-Engels-Werke^ Vol 2, p 58.