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The Wandering Jew

by Eugène Sue

Downloads: Under 100
First published: 1844
Pages: 1,928

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About this book

Eugene Sue serialized this in 1844 and half of France waited for the next installment. Seven scattered heirs of a Huguenot family, driven abroad by persecution a century and a half earlier, are summoned to a house in Paris where a fortune has been quietly multiplying, and each of them has to survive the journey there. Working against them is the Jesuit order, whose agents move by patience, blackmail and forged letters rather than swords. Watching over them are two figures out of legend, the Wandering Jew and his sister, who can help only from a distance. Sue's anticlericalism was fierce enough to feed real political argument, and the melodrama still moves at speed.

About the author

Eugène Sue

Eugene Sue (1804-1857) was a French novelist and former naval surgeon who became one of the first mass market serial writers with The Mysteries of Paris. His socialist sympathies won him a seat in the National Assembly and, after Louis Napoleon's coup, exile in Savoy, where he died.