--every one forges at least one, with whose assistance he claims
to open that combination lock. It must be that all these types have
lived, bless my soul! that they live to-day, exactly identical from
head to foot. Monpavon is So-and-So, is he not? Jenkins' resemblance is
striking. One man is angry because he is in it, another one because he
is not in it; and, beginning with this eagerness for scandal, there is
nothing, not even chance similarities of name, fatal in the modern
novel, descriptions of streets, numbers of houses selected at random,
that has not served to give identity to beings built of a thousand
pieces and, moreover, absolutely imaginary.

The author is too modest to take all this outcry to himself. He knows
how great a part the friendly or treacherous indiscretions of the
newspapers have had therein; and without thanking the former more than
is seemly, without too great ill-will to the latter, he resigns himself
to the stormy prospect as something inevitable, and simply deems
himself in duty bound to affirm that he has never, in twenty years of
upright, literary toil, resorted to that element of success, neither on
this occasion nor on any other. As he turned the leaves of his memory,
which it is every novelist's right and duty to do, he recalled a
strange episode that occurred in cosmopolitan Paris some fifteen years
ago. The romance of a dazzling career that shot swiftly across the
Parisian sky like a meteor evidently served as the frame-work of _The
Nabob_, a picture of manners and morals at the close of the Second
Empire. But around that central situation and certain well-known
incidents, which it was every one's right to study and revive, what a
world of fancy, what inventions, what elaboration, and, above all, what
an outlay of that incessant, universal, almost unconscious observation,
without which there could be no imaginative writers. Furthermore, to
obtain an idea of the "crystallizing" labor involved in transporting
the simplest circumstances from reality to fiction, from life to
romance, one need only open the _Moniteur Officiel_ of February, 1864,
and compare a certain session of the Corps Legislatif with the picture
that I give of it in my book. Who could have supposed that, after the
lapse of so many years, this Paris, famous for its short memory, would
recognize the original model in the idealized picture the novelist has
drawn of him, and that voices would be raised to charge with
ingra