was aged forty, and had daughters old enough to be in love. The reviewers, by the way, were staggered by my hardihood in offering a woman of forty as a subject of serious interest to the public. But I meant to go much farther than forty! Finally, as a supreme reason, I had the example and the challenge of Guy de Maupassant’s
Une Vie. In the nineties we used to regard
Une Vie with mute awe, as being the summit of achievement in fiction. And I remember being very cross with
Mr. Bernard Shaw because, having read
Une Vie at the suggestion (I think) of
Mr. William Archer, he failed to see in it anything very remarkable. Here I must confess that, in 1908, I read
Une Vie again, and in spite of a natural anxiety to differ from
Mr. Bernard Shaw, I was gravely disappointed with it. It is a fine novel, but decidedly inferior to
Pierre et Jean or even
Fort Comme la Mort. To return to the year 1903.
Une Vie relates the entire life history of a woman. I settled in the privacy of my own head that my book about the development of a young girl into a stout old lady must be the English
Une Vie. I have been accused of every fault except a lack of self-confidence, and in a few weeks I settled a further point, namely, that my book must “go one better” than
Une Vie, and that to this end it must be the life-history of two women instead of only one. Hence,
The Old Wives’ Tale has two heroines. Constance was the original; Sophia was created out of bravado, just to indicate that I declined to consider Guy de Maupassant as the last forerunner of the deluge. I was intimidated by the audacity of my project, but I had sworn to carry it out. For several years I looked it squarely in the face at intervals, and then walked away to write novels of smaller scope, of which I produced five or six. But I could not dally forever, and in the autumn of 1907 I actually began to write it, in a village near Fontainebleau, where I rented half a house from a retired railway servant. I calculated that it would be 200,000 words long (which it exactly proved to be), and I had a vague notion that no novel of such dimensions (except Richardson’s) had ever been written before. So I counted the words in several famous Victorian novels, and discovered to my relief that the famous Victorian novels average 400,000 words apiece. I wrote the first part of the novel in six weeks. It was fairly easy to me, because, in the seventies, in the first decade of my life, I had lived in the actual draper’s shop of the Baines’s, and knew it as only a child could know it. Then I went to London on a visit. I tried to continue the book in a London hotel, but London was too distracting, and I put the thing away, and during January and February of 1908, I wrote
Buried Alive, which was published immediately, and was received with majestic indifference by the English public, an indifference which has persisted to this day.
I then returned to the Fontainebleau region and gave The Old Wives’ Tale no rest till I finished it at the end of July, 1908. It was published in the autumn of the same year, and for six weeks afterward the English public steadily confirmed an opinion expressed by a certain person in whose judgment I had confidence, to the effect that the work was honest but dull, and that when it was not dull it had a regrettable tendency to facetiousness. My publishers, though brave fellows, were somewhat disheartened; however, the reception of the book gradually became less and less frigid.
With regard to the French portion of the story, it was not until I had written the first part that I saw from a study of my chronological basis that the Siege of Paris might be brought into the tale. The idea was seductive; but I hated, and still hate, the awful business of research; and I only knew the Paris of the Twentieth Century. Now I was aware that my railway servant and his wife had been living in Paris at the time of the war. I said to the old man, “By the way, you went through the Siege of Paris, didn’t you?” He turned to his old wife and said, uncertainly, “The Siege of Paris? Yes, we did, didn’t we?” The Siege of Paris had been only one incident among many in their lives. Of course, they remembered it well, though not vividly, and I gained much information from them. But the most useful thing which I gained from them was the perception, startling at first, that ordinary people went on living very ordinary lives in Paris during the siege, and that to the vast mass of the population the siege was not the dramatic, spectacular, thrilling, ecstatic affair that is described in history. Encouraged by this perception, I decided to include the siege in my scheme. I read Sarcey’s diary of the siege aloud to my wife, and I looked at the pictures in Jules Claretie’s popular work on the siege and the commune, and I glanced at the printed collection of official documents, and there my research ended.
It has been asserted that unless I had actually been present at a public execution, I could not have written the chapter in which Sophia was at the Auxerre solemnity. I have not been present at a public execution, as the whole of my information about public executions was derived from a series of articles on them which I read in
