Why do these names come to me, ‘giving me short sighs,’ when I try to recall the romancers and novelists I have known or encountered, loved, liked, disliked? Is it because the haze of the Defence of Guenevere floated, drifted autumnally through my youthful dreamland just at the moment I met novelists of my own selection?

I had often seen Hector Malot (sixty of whose volumes are on the shelves of the London Library) with my parents. I knew his beard, his Sans famille, and I had wondered why his Romain Kalbris had never been given to me. His Bohème tapageuse, his Héritage d’Arthur (oddly connected in my first impressions with my elder brother’s prospects), and his Belle Madame Donis were not for the young, I was well aware.