, in us, have been skilfully and successfully drugged. There are
drugs enough, clearly - it is all a question of applying them with tact; in
which case the way things don't happen may be artfully made to pass for the way
things do.
    Amusing and even touching to me, I profess, at this time of day, the
ingenuity (worthy, with whatever lapses, of a better cause) with which, on
behalf of Newman's adventure, this hocus-pocus is attempted: the value of the
instance not being diminished either, surely, by its having been attempted in
such evident good faith. Yes, all is romantic to my actual vision here, and not
least so, I hasten to add, the fabulous felicity of my candour. The way things
happen is frankly not the way in which they are represented as having happened,
in Paris, to my hero: the situation I had conceived only saddled me with that
for want of my invention of something better. The great house of Bellegarde, in
a word, would, I now feel, given the circumstances, given the whole of the
ground, have comported itself in a manner as different as possible from the
manner to which my narrative commits it; of which truth, moreover, I am by no
means sure that, in spite of what I have called my serenity, I had not all the
while an uneasy suspicion. I had dug in my path, alas, a hole into which I was
destined to fall. I was so possessed of my idea that Newman should be ill-used -
which was the essence of my subject - that I attached too scant an importance to
its fashion of coming about. Almost any fashion would serve, I appear to have
assumed, that would give me my main chance for him; a matter depending not so
much on the particular trick played him as on the interesting face presented by
him to any damnable trick. So where I part company with terra-firma is in making
that projected, that performed outrage so much more showy, dramatically
speaking, than sound. Had I patched it up to a greater apparent soundness my own
trick, artistically speaking, would have been played; I should have cut the
cable without my reader's suspecting it. I doubtless at the time, I repeat,
believed I had taken my precautions; but truly they should have been greater, to
impart the air of truth to the attitude - that is first to the pomp and
circumstance, and second to the queer falsity - of the Bellegardes.
    They would positively
