January 20

Joseph Marie Eugène Sue was born on the 20th in 1804. He was a writer who achieved some measure of success, if by success you mean that he was able to get mediocre books consistently published. Some believe that a real sign of success is when somebody begins to plagiarize your work. One book that he wrote was Les Mystères du peuple, an illustrated book on the Seven Deadly Sins. Another writer, Maurice Joly, plagiarized much of the work and worked it into an anti-Napoleon III diatribe titled, Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. After this, the trail gets a bit muddy. Hermann Goedsche in turn plagiarized the work plagiarized by Joly. This book, which plagiarized a plagiarized book, became the basis for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, unfortunately a long-lived anti-Semitic fraud.