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Memories of a Man of Letters, Artists' Wives, Etc
Memories of a Man of Letters Artists' Wives Etc Author:Alphonse Daudet General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1900 Original Publisher: Little, Brown and company Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com whe... more »re you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: HISTORY OF MY BOOKS. -- NUMA ROUMESTAN. WHEN I began this history of my books, wherein some persons may have detected the self-conceit of an author, but which seemed to me the true method, original and distinctive, of writing the memoirs of a man of letters on the margin of his books, I took great pleasure in it, I confess. To-day, my pleasure has sensibly diminished. In the first place the idea has lost its savor, having been adopted by several of my confreres and not the least illustrious of them; and then the constantly increasing vogue of reporting, great and small, the uproar and dust which it raises about the play or the book, in the shape of anecdotal details which a writer who is neither unapproachable in his grandeur nor of a surly temper willingly allows to be extorted from him. So that my auto-historic task has become more difficult; my fine shoes, which I kept in reserve, to be worn only on great occasions, have been trodden down at the heel. It is very certain, for instance, that what the newspapers said a few months ago apropos of the comedy founded on Numa Roumestan, and played at the Ode"on, their research and their praiseshave left almost nothing of interest for me to say about my book, and have exposed me to the danger of tedious repetition. At all events it has helped me to shatter once and for all the legend, propagated by people who did not themselves believe it, that Gambetta was concealed under Roumestan. As if it were possible! as if, had I attempted to make a Gambetta, anybody could have mistaken the picture, even under the mask o...« less