A chief source of the high prices paid to writers and, perhaps, the most profitable literary novelty of the nineteenth century [in Paris], was the newspaper serialization of their novels. Alexandre Dumas père wrote 100,000 lines a year for Le Siècle at 1.50 francs a line. Eugène Sue was paid 100,000 by Le Constitutional for The Wandering Jew … In turn serialized literature proved a tremendous circulation builder … An inevitable outgrowth of this was the use of publicity stunts and the fabrication of customer intrigue and anxiety as a means of merchandising literature. At times the publication of a serial novel was interrupted without explanation in order to create the impression that the author was ill and, perhaps, unable to produce the next installment when, in fact, the novel had been written and delivered in advance … ‘Industrialised literature’… happens to describe well the methods of its greatest practitioner, Alexandre Dumas, père, who kept a stable of ghost writers readying manuscripts for his signature. In one of the literary jokes of the period the elder Dumas asks his son, also a novelist, ‘Have you seen my latest work?’ and Dumas fils answers, ‘No, father, have you?’