My _Scènes historiques sur le règne de Charles VI._ were my first successful things in the _Revue des Deux_ _Mondes._ We shall presently see the result which this proved success had for me. That success decided me to write a series of romances which should extend from the reign of Charles VI. to our own day. My first desire is always limitless; my first inspiration even to achieve the impossible. Only when I become infatuated, half through pride and half through love of my art, do I achieve the impossible. How?--I will try to tell you, although I do not understand it very thoroughly myself: by working as nobody else works, cutting off all the extraneous details of life and doing without sleep. When once ambition has taken shape in my thoughts my whole mind is set to the putting of it into execution. Having discovered a vein of gold in the well of the beginning of the fifteenth century, in which I had been digging, I never doubted, so great was my confidence in myself, that at each fresh well I dug in a century nearer our own times, if I did not find a vein of gold I should at least find one of platinum or silver. I put the silver last because, at this period, platinum still held an intermediary value between silver and gold. Nevertheless, one thing made me uneasy: from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, from Charles VI. to Napoleon, I should teach history to the public whilst learning it myself--but who would teach it me from Clovis to Charles VI.? May I be forgiven for saying _Clovis._ I called it so then, I still call it so now, but, from 1833 to 1840, I spoke of _Hlodewig (Chlodgwig)._ True, no one understood whom I meant; that is why I returned to calling it _Clovis_--like the rest of the world. I decided to write a few pages of introduction to my novel, _Isabeau de Bavière,_ which was intended to open the series of my historical novels. You shall judge of my ignorance and appreciate my innocence, for I am going to tell you something that certainly no one else would admit. To learn the history of France, of which I did not know a word in 1831 (except that connected with Henri III.), and which, in common with general opinion, I held to be the most wearisome history in the whole world, I bought the _Histoire de France,_ at the request of, and in response to, the Abbé Gauthier, since revised and corrected by M. de Moyencourt. So I bravely set to work to study the history of France, copying out such notes as the following as seriously as possible, which summed up a whole chapter poetically: "MÉMOIRES D'ALEX. DUMAS