Well! This is a book that I shall have written twice! Habent sua fata libelli!

People may consider that such a patient reconstruction is but a childish, a lamentable squandering of effort; that, in a novel originally flawed with indestructible faults, no interposition of adjectives, no writing between the lines, no strip of paper glued on the side, may ever improve those ill-observed characters, give light and colouring to those dead landscapes, and correct those developments of passion that have been inaccurately followed.

This I believe would be true of any work of pure imagination, a fairy tale or an ideal romance.

If I had created some enchanted prince or a beau in the fashion of Antony, and if I had endowed him, in my original edition, with fair hair and mystical dreams, it would not be really useful to do all my work again in a new edition, and give my hero black locks and carnal nightmares. This would be but a fantasy substituting another fantasy. It would be better to write a new book, introducing the same beau with a new name, a new beard and new passions.

Yet, I believe things are different when the subject is a novel of observation and reality, based on experience, wrought from live documents. Now if I wanted to produce the type of a gambler, and if I improvised him with reminiscences from half-forgotten readings, and without any more notes than those collected in one night, an honest evening in a seaside town, watching genial cousins play for beans a homely game of cribbage — then I should be in danger of making a false gambler, childish, vague and conventional.