Understand, therefore, that the ardour of production may conduce to a like result, that the author incarnates himself, as it were, in the hero of his imagination so completely that he loses himself and burns with the imaginary flames of this hero's love and ambition! This was precisely the effect produced upon me in narrating the history of a personage who figured under the title of Brisacier, about the time of Louis XV, I believe. Where did I read the fatal biography of this adventurer? I have found again that of the Abbé of Bucquoy, but I cannot recall the slightest historical proof of the existence of this illustrious unknown. What for you, dear Master, would have been but a pastime,--you, who have with clever artifices so bewildered our minds concerning the old chronicles, that posterity will never be able to disentangle truth from fiction, and is certain to credit your invention with all the characters from history that figure in your romances--this became for me a veritable obsession. To invent, is in reality only to recollect, says a certain moralist. Finding no proofs of the material existence of my hero, I suddenly came to believe in the transmigration of souls, not less firmly than Pythagoras or Peter Leroux. Even the eighteenth century, in which I believed myself to have lived, was full of these illusions. Do you remember that courtier who recalled distinctly that he was once a sofa? Whereupon Schahabaham exclaimed with enthusiasm, "What, you were once a sofa! why, that is delightful!--Tell me, were you embroidered?" As for me, I was embroidered at every seam. From the moment when I first grasped the continuity of all my previous existences, I figured as readily in one character as another, prince, king, mage, genie, or even god; could I unite my memories in one masterpiece, it would represent the Dream of Scipio, the Vision of Tasso or the Divine Comedy of Dante. Renouncing, henceforth, all pretensions to inspiration or illumination, I can offer only what you so justly call impracticable theories, an impossible book, whose first chapter, subjoined below, seems but to furnish the context of the Comic Romance of Scarron.... Read and judge for yourself: A TRAGIC ROMANCE.