five ordinary books; the first printing of a
Pléiade volume runs to 15 000 copies;
many volumes have to be reprinted within
a few months; that was the case, surprisin
gly, of some rather abstruse editions, such
as Les Présocratiques and Écrits inter-
testamentaires (early Greek philosophers
and apocryphal gospels). English authors
sell less well than that: the first volume of
my edition of Conrad took less than two
years to sell 15 000 copies, but the later
volumes had sales that dwindled, peaked,
and pined (and so, as editor, did I). Kip
ling did less well than Conrad, and Dic
kens seemed to lag behind even Kipling.
Yet the magic threshold of 15 000 is al
ways reached sooner or later - in fact,
after a few years; an author who has been
consecrated by a Pléiade edition has come
to stay on the French book market; he or
she is henceforth always available at least
in that distinguished format. Nor does that
preclude her or his appearance in popular
paperbacks; on the contrary, Gallimard,
who are the publishers of the Pléiade, also
bring out a very effective series of cheap
volumes called Folio. That, and other
similar series, like Gamier Flammarion,
Presses Pocket, Bouquins, Fivre de Poche,
also have Dickens Novels on their respec
tive catalogues. So Dickens is present in
France nowadays, and, as I said, he is, for
an English novelist of the past, appreciated
and enjoyed.
I wish I could specify the ways in which
the French appreciation of Dickens differs
from our national enjoyment of our own
authors, but that is by no means an easy
task. We have at least four giants who are
more or less the contemporaries of Dic
kens, Thackeray, George Eliot and others:
Victor Hugo, Balzac, Stendhal, and Flau
bert. Hugo's Les Misérables and Flau
bert's Madame Bovary have unquestiona
bly entered the national consciousness and
are felt to be part of our heritage. Stend
hal's Chartreuse or his Le Rouge et le noir
have been read by nearly everybody and
Stendhal has his addicts, perhaps on a
slightly more élitist level than Flaubert or
certainly than Hugo. Balzac's work is
acknowledged to be immense and impres
sive, but, apart from his relatively simple
novels like Eugénie Grandet or Le Père
Goriot, his audience is restricted. Relative
ly few people have read all of Balzac's
fiction. Well not one of Dickens's literary
creations has achieved with the French
public a status really comparable to that of
Bovary, or Grandet or Goriot, or Hugo's
Gavroche, or Stendhal's Julien Sorel. But
then that was hardly to be expected. And it
remains true that, partly on the strength of
modern editions, partly on the weakness of
drastically abridged juvenile versions,
partly on the merits of several good films,
names like those of Oliver Twist, David
Copperfield, and Pip of Great Expecta
tions unquestionably ring a bell. Even
persons like Mr Micawber or Uriah Heep
would, I think, be recognized by a sizable
portion of the French reading public. More
importantly, the epithet dickensien-dicken-
sienne itself means something to most
people in France. And that is a form of
recognition, response, and survival that
Dickens himself would have appreciated.
In short, Dickens loved France, and Dic
kens was and is loved by the French. The
story I have tried to summarize is indeed
after all a love story; I mean a story of
mutual love.
Admittedly, there are bound to remain
huge differences. Even if Dickens seems
to have exerted a certain amount of influ
ence over some French writers of the
present century, our contemporaries tend
to follow new avenues of literary creation
and to reject the past. The creators of the
fascinating though short-lived nouveau
roman frangais almost certainly believed
themselves to be far removed from the
type of literature to which Dickens had
belonged. They may not have realized how
profoundly modern he had been, and how
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