It was practically my only experience of dictation of fiction. I had
never been able to do it, and have not been able to do it since, and
I am glad that it is so, for I should have a fear of being led into mere
rhetoric. It did not, however, seem to matter with this book. It wrote
itself anywhere. The proofs of the first quarter of the book were in my
hands before I had finished writing the last quarter.
It took me a long time to recover from the great effort of that five
weeks, but I never regretted those consuming fires which burned up sleep
and energy and ravaged the vitality of my imagination. The story was
founded on the incident described in the first pages of the book, which
was practically as I experienced it when I was a little child. The
picture there drawn of Valmond was the memory of just such a man as stood
at the four corners in front of the little hotel and scattered his hot
pennies to the children of the village. Also, my father used to tell me
as a child a story of Napoleon, whose history he knew as well as any man
living, and something of that story may be found in the fifth chapter of
the book where Valmond promotes Sergeant Lagroin from non-commissioned
rank, first to be captain, then to be colonel, and then to be general,
all in a moment, as it were.
I cannot tell the original story as my father told it to me here,
but it was the tale of how a sergeant in the Old Guard, having shared his
bivouac supper of roasted potatoes with the Emperor, was told by Napoleon
that he should sup with his Emperor when they returned to Versailles.
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