ne else in the place
except the old negro caretaker and his wife. Four-fifths of the book was
written in three weeks there. Then I went to New York, and at the Lotus
Club, where I had a room, I finished it--but not quite. There were a
few pages of the book to do when I went for my walk in Fifth Avenue one
afternoon. I could not shake the thing off, the last pages demanded to
be written. The sermon which the old Cure was preaching on Valmond's
death was running in my head. I could not continue my walk. Then and
there I stepped into the Windsor Hotel, which I was passing, and asked
if there was a stenographer at liberty. There was. In the stenographer's
office of the Windsor Hotel, with the life of a caravanserai buzzing
around me, I dictated the last few pages of When Valmond Came to
Pontiac. It was practically my only experience of dictation of fiction.
I had never been able to do it, and have not been able to do it since,
and I am glad that it is so, for I should have a fear of being led into
mere rhetoric. It did not, however, seem to matter with this book. It
wrote itself anywhere. The proofs of the first quarter of the book were
in my hands before I had finished writing the last quarter.

It took me a long time to recover from the great effort of that five
weeks, but I never regretted those consuming fires which burned up sleep
and energy and ravaged the vitality of my imagination. The story was
founded on the incident described in the first pages of the book, which
was practically as I experienced it when I was a little child. The
picture there drawn of Valmond was the memory of just such a man as
stood at the four corners in front of the little hotel and scattered his
hot pennies to the children of the village. Also, my father used to tell
me as a child a story of Napoleon, whose history he knew as well as
any man living, and something of that story may be found in the fifth
chapter of the book where Valmond promotes Sergeant Lagroin from
non-commissioned rank, first to be captain, then to be colonel, and then
to be general, all in a moment, as it were.

I cannot tell the original story as my father told it to me here, but
it was the tale of how a sergeant in the Old Guard, having shared
his bivouac supper of roasted potatoes with the Emperor, was told by
Napoleon that he should sup with his Emperor when they returned to
Versailles. The old sergeant appeared at Versailles in course of time
and demanded admittance