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 ingratitude one who most assuredly was not his hero's "assiduous guest," but simply, in their infrequent meetings, an inquisitive acquaintance on whose mind the truth is quickly photographed, and who can never efface from his memory the images that are once imprinted thereon?