Walking the floor one day at Viviani, smoking vigorously, he
said to Mrs. Clemens and Susy:
"I shall never be accepted seriously over my own signature. People
always want to laugh over what I write and are disappointed if they don't
find a joke in it. This is to be a serious book. It means more to me
than anything I have ever undertaken. I shall write it anonymously."
So it was that that gentle, quaint Sieur de Conte took up the pen, and
the tale of Joan was begun in that beautiful spot which of all others
seems now the proper environment for its lovely telling.
He wrote rapidly once he got his plan perfected and his material
arranged. The reading of his youth and manhood, with the vivid
impressions of that earlier time, became now something remembered, not
merely as reading, but as fact.
Others of the family went down into the city almost daily, but he
remained in that still garden with Joan as his companion--the old Sieur
de Conte, saturated with memories, pouring out that marvelous and tragic
tale. At the end of each day he would read to the others what he had
written, to their enjoyment and wonder.
How rapidly he worked may be judged from a letter which he wrote to Hall
in February, in which he said:
I am writing a companion piece to 'The Prince and the Pauper', which is
half done & will make 200,000 words.
That is to say, he had written one hundred thousand words in a period of
perhaps six weeks, marvelous work when one remembers that after all he
was writing history, some of which he must dig laboriously from a foreign
source.
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