ps the valueless fragments into
his waste-basket.... But I do know that the entire book developed,
howsoever helterskelter, and after fumbling in no matter how many blind
alleys, from that first memorandum about the troubling window of Ageus.
All leads toward--and through--that window.

The book, then, was published in the February of 1921. I need not here
deal with its semi-serial appearance in the guise of short stories:
these details are recorded elsewhere. But I confess with appropriate
humility that the reception of "Figures of Earth" by the public was, as
I have written in another place, a depressing business. This romance, at
that time, through one extraneous reason and another, disappointed
well-nigh everybody, for all that it has since become, so near as I can
judge, the best liked of my books, especially among women. It seems,
indeed, a fact sufficiently edifying that, in appraising the two
legendary heroes of Poictesme, the sex of whom Jurgen esteemed himself a
connoisseur, should, almost unanimously, prefer Manuel.

For the rest,--since, as you may remember, this is the third preface
which I have written for this book,--I can but repeat more or less what
I have conceded elsewhere. This "Figures of Earth" appeared immediately
following, and during the temporary sequestration of, "Jurgen." The fact
was forthwith, quite unreticently, discovered that in "Figures of Earth"
I had not succeeded in my attempt to rewrite its predecessor: and this
crass failure, so open, so flagrant, and so undeniable, caused what I
can only describe as the instant and overwhelming and universal triumph
of "Figures of Earth" to be precisely what did not occur. In 1921
Comstockery still surged, of course, in full cry against the imprisoned
pawnbroker and the crimes of his author, both literary and personal; and
the, after all, tolerably large portion of the reading public who were
not disgusted by Jurgen's lechery were now, so near as I could gather,
enraged by Manuel's lack of it.

It followed that--among the futile persons who use serious, long words
in talking about mere books,--aggrieved reproof of my auctorial
malversations, upon the one ground or the other, became in 1921
biloquial and pandemic. Not many other volumes, I believe, have been
burlesqued and cried down in the public prints by their own
dedicatees.... But from the cicatrix of that healed wound I turn away. I
preserve a forgiving silence, comparable to that of Herm