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"Do you know," I said to a friend six months ago, while I was looking over the rough draft of my memoirs, "that I have decided to print them?" "You will do well," he answered; "but you must write a preface—a bit of a preface is necessary." "I do not think so," I said. "In my opinion the few words on the first page will suffice." My friend read over the first page and replied, "That's enough."

Now, however, a couple of words do not seem to me superfluous—first, in order that I may express my surprise and pleasure that my book, written just as it came to me, has been received with so much kindness; and then to explain that this second edition has been enlarged by some additions and necessary notes. The additions do not form an appendix, but are inserted in the chapters, each in its proper place.

It did not seem advisable to me, as it did to some other persons, to enlarge this book by letters, documents, and other writings of mine. I thought this would interfere with the simplicity and brevity of my first plan.

In re-reading this book, I admit that I have found passages here and there which I felt tempted to correct, or rather to polish and improve in style, but I have let them go. Who knows that I should not have made them worse? It seems to me (perhaps I am wrong) not to perceive in good writers the labour, the smoothing, and the transposition of words, and so on, but a rapid and broad embodiment of the idea in the words that were born with it.

One last and most essential word I have reserved for the end as a bonne bouche. Some persons have excusably and pleasantly observed that to write a book about one's self while the author is living is both very difficult and rather immodest. I replied to them, both by word of mouth and through the press, that although on account of my life and works I had studied to be as temperate and unpretentious as the truth and the facts would allow, still here and there my narrative with regard to some persons might not be agreeable, and therefore after my death it might be discredited or denied. No, this must not be, I said, and say again. I am alive, and am here to correct everything at variance with the truth, and also (I wish to be just) what is wanting in chivalrousness.