a small
club located there under the name of Le Bouge (The Den); for Lord
Seymour, the Duke de Nemours, Prince Demidoff, and the rest were
sufficiently clear-sighted to perceive that a Jockey Club governed on
the English principle was entirely out of the question. That was the
origin of the French Jockey Club, which, after various migrations, is,
at the time of writing, magnificently housed in one of the palatial
mansions of the Rue Scribe. As a matter of course, some of the
fashionable _habitues_ of the Cafe de Paris, though not knowing a
fetlock from a pastern, were but too pleased to join an institution
which, with the mania for everything English in full swing, then
conferred as it were upon its members a kind of patent of "good form,"
and, above all, of exclusiveness, for which some, even amidst the
fleshpots of the celebrated restaurant, longed. Because, it must be
remembered, though the majority of the company at the Cafe de Paris were
very well from the point of view of birth and social position, there was
no possibility of excluding those who could lay no claim to such
distinctions, provided they had the money to pay their reckoning, and
most of them had more than enough for that. It appears that Eugene Sue
was not so objectionable as he became afterwards, when the wonderful
success of his "Mysteres de Paris" and the "Juif-Errant" had turned his
head; he was made an original member of the club. Election on the
nomination by three sponsors was not necessary then. That article was
not inserted in the rules until two years after the foundation of the
Paris Jockey Club.

Of the success attending Sue's two best-known works, I can speak from
personal experience; for I was old enough to be impressed by it, and
foolish enough to rank him, on account of it, with Balzac and Dumas,
perhaps a little higher than the former. After the lapse of many years,
I can only console myself for my infatuation with the thought that
thousands, of far greater intellectual attainments than mine, were in
the same boat, for it must not be supposed that the _furore_ created by
"Les Mysteres de Paris" was confined to one class, and that class the
worst educated one. While it appeared in serial form in the _Debats_,
one had to bespeak the paper several hours beforehand, because, unless
one subscribed to it, it was impossible to get it from the news-vendors.
As for the reading-rooms where it was supposed to be kept, the
proprietors frankly la