Under The Rose (e-book) (used book) | Anatole France | bookbook.eu

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feel that some apology is due from me for encumbering with so much matter of my own, the pages—alas, too few! — written by Anatole France during the closing years of his life, and hitherto left unpublished. Yet all who take delight in his works and revere his memory will, I am sure, understand the twofold sentiment by which I have been animated. In the first place, it was my aim to show, in the light of the unfinished work he has left behind him, how conscientiously he laboured up to the very end of his life, how scrupulously he consulted his authorities, how abundantly he read, and how carefully he composed, often drafting and re-drafting the outline of his work as many as eight times. To the particulars relating to the last finished pages he has bequeathed to us, I have added a few notes concerning work planned by him but never brought to completion, work of which a rapid sketch is all that remains to us, or a sentence jotted down on a scrap of paper, often merely something that had struck him in the course of conversation. But I had another purpose also. A year has gone by since he was laid in the grave. The silence imposed upon us by a sense of what was befitting at such a time may now be broken, and I intend to record my protest against the ignoble tittle-tattle of certain gossipmongers, against the baseless calumnies of his detractors.