THE WONDERFUL ROMANCE FROM THE FRENCH OF PIERRE DE COULEVAIN Author of "On the Branch," "The Heart of Life," 66 PREFACE The Wonderful Romance! It certainly is not mine. It is not even one of those that the human brain produces. It is the romance which the divine Powers are elaborating in the depths of the Infinite. It is that romance which we are all living, from morning to night and from night to morning; the one in which we are the heroes and the martyrs. It is the romance of this Earth of ours. My latest volume was only just finished, when the literary cells of my brain set to work once more. They took up, for the fourth time, a novel planned out after the birth of Eve Triumphant. The individuals, manufactured with features and impressions stored up in my brain in the most mysterious way, appeared once more upon the screen. There was a woman's face, a beautiful, young face of which I had once caught a glimpse, with a ray of sunshine falling on it. Then there was the face of a man of the world, one of the last scions of an old race, a man of some 45 years of age. He was dark, his hair was just turning grey, the pupils of his eyes were very light, he was clean shaven and his mouth. had an ironical, bad expression, the expression of a conqueror who knows all the bitterness of victory. There was the face, too, of a working-man, with the savage expression of Holbein's Christ and then the face of a girl of sorrows. |