Marcel bowed humbly.... "Comme monsieur voudra." Then a doubt assailed him. "Peut-être que la petite Polonaise vous suffira à tous les deux?"
"Jamais de la vie!" I shouted, "Flûte, Mercure, allez! Je suis puceau!"
Marcel was equal to this. "Et ta soeur?" he demanded as he disappeared down the staircase.
He had put us meanwhile in the very chamber with the red curtains and the picture of Cupid and Psyche that Sitgreaves had described. Perhaps all the rooms were similarly decorated. I lounged on the bed while Sitgreaves sat on a chair and smoked....
I answered his last question, "No, they are true, but there is selection and form."
"While other memoirs have neither selection nor form and usually are not altogether accurate in the bargain...."
"Especially Madame Melba's...."
"Especially," agreed Sitgreaves delightedly, "Madame Melba's."
"Moore is really right," I went on. "He says that some people insist that Balzac was greater than Turgeniev, because the Frenchman took his characters from imagination, the Russian his from life. You will remember, however, that Edgar Saltus says, 'The manufacture of fiction from facts was begun by Balzac.' Moore's point is that all great writers write from observation. There is no other way. A character may have more or less resemblance to the original; it may be derived and bear a different name; still there must have been something.... In a letter which Moore once wrote me stands the phrase, 'Memory is the mother of the Muses.' 'Hail and Farewell' is just as much a work of imagination, according to Moore, as 'A Nest of Noblemen' or 'Les Illusions Perdues.'"
"Of course," admitted Sitgreaves. "No writer but what has suffered from the recognition of his characters. Dickens got into trouble. Oscar Wilde is said to have done himself in 'Dorian Gray,' and Meredith's models for 'The Tragic Comedians' and 'Diana of the Crossways' are well known."