And I sat down to my oaken bureau with the air of a man who has resolved to commit a stupendous crime. Perhaps indeed it was a crime, this my first serious challenge to a neglectful and careless world. At any rate it was meant to be the beginning of the end, the end being twofold--fame and a thousand a year. You must bear well in mind that I was by no means the ordinary person, and my novel was by no means to be the ordinary novel. In these cases the very essence of the situation is always that one is not ordinary. I had just discovered that I could write--and when I use the term "write" here, I use it in a special sense, to be appreciated only by those elect who can themselves "write," and difficult of comprehension by all others. I had had a _conte_--exquisitely Gallic as to spirit and form--in the "Yellow Book," and that _conte_ had been lauded in the "South Audley Street Gazette" or some organ of destructive criticism. My friends believed in Art, themselves, and me. I believed in myself, Art, and them. Could any factor be lacking to render the scene sublime and historic? So I sat down to write my first novel, under the sweet influences of the de Goncourts, Turgenev, Flaubert, and de Maupassant. It was to be entirely unlike all English novels except those of one author, whose name I shall not mention now, for the reason that I have afore-time made my admiration of that author very public. I clearly remember that the purpose uppermost in my mind was to imitate what I may call the physical characteristics of French novels. There were to be no poetical quotations in my novel, no titles to the chapters; the narrative was to be divided irregularly into sections by Roman numerals only; and it was indispensable that a certain proportion of these sections should begin or end abruptly. As thus, for a beginning:--"Gerald suddenly changed the conversation, and taking the final match from his match-box at last agreed to light a cigar." And for an ending:--"Her tremulous eyes sought his; breathing a sigh she murmured . . ." O succession of dots, charged with significance vague but tremendous, there were to be hundreds of you in my novel, because you play so important a part in the literature of the country of Victor Hugo and M. Loubet! So much for the physical characteristics. To come nearer to the soul of it, my novel was to be a mosaic consisting exclusively of Flaubert's _mots justes_--it was to be _mots justes_ composed into the famous _écriture artiste_ of the de Goncourts. The sentences were to perform the trick of "the rise and fall." The adjectives were to have colour, the verbs were to have colour, and perhaps it was a _sine qua non_ that even the pronouns should be prismatic--I forget. And all these effects were to be obtained without the most trifling sacrifice of truth. There was to be no bowing in the house of the Rimmon of sentimentality. Life being grey, sinister, and melancholy, my novel must be grey, sinister, and melancholy. As a