I am convinced that my sins, as far as I am to blame for them, are only in the area of my personal life, but not in my literature; in the latter area, I not conscious of any misdeeds. What I have achieved through my "traveller's tales", will be revealed only after my death by the thousands of letters I have received, but even then, only my biographer will get to see them; they will not be published. These works used to be praised and adored, until one day, a certain unscrupulous person had nothing better to do than to state in public that I had also written other things aside from them, but that those were "abysmally" indecent. Even if this had been true, it could not have changed the "traveller's tales", neither their inner contents nor their external form. Nevertheless, from this day on, they were first regarded with suspicion, then they were slandered more and more, and finally they were even declared to be perfectly harmful and were expelled from the libraries, where they used to be welcomed before. Why? Had they changed? No! Had the bibliographical customs, the laws of morality changed? No! Had the needs of the readers become different? This is not it either! But what other reason was there? This was simply because of this circle of people from the realm of trashy literature and colportage, who were determined to, as they themselves used to put it, "destroy me". But is it humanly possible that such a circle of people could gain such an extensive and incomprehensible influence on the world literature and its critics? Unfortunately yes! I will have to write about this in the next chapter. This mob does not even stop at casting their own sins and literary crimes upon me and at presenting themselves as spotless! There are so-called critics which have been staining my reputation for as long as ten years with all kinds of slander on account of the novels I wrote for Münchmeyer, but have not blamed the publisher a single time in even the slightest extent. I call this a disgrace!