A hundred years ago Le Sage wrote these words at the head of _Gil Blas_: "As there are persons who cannot read a book without making personal application of the vicious or absurd characters they find therein, I hereby declare for the benefit of such evil-minded readers that they will err in making such application of the portraits in this book. I make public avowal that my only aim has been to represent the life of mankind as it is." Without attempting to draw any comparison between Le Sage's novel and my own, I may say that I should have liked to place a declaration of the same nature on the first page of _The Nabob_, at the time of its publication. Several reasons prevented my doing so. In the first place, the fear that such an advertisement might seem too much like a bait thrown out to the public, an attempt to compel its attention. Secondly, I was far from suspecting that a book written with a purely literary purpose could acquire at a bound such anecdotal importance, and bring down upon me such a buzzing swarm of complaints. Indeed, such a thing was never seen before. Not a line of my work, not one of its heroes, not even a character of secondary importance, but has become a pretext for allusions and protestations. To no purpose does the author deny the imputation, swear by all the gods that there is no key to his novel--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.