Excerpt from Notes on Life and Letters The only thing that will not be found amongst those Figures and Things that have passed away will be Conrad en pantoufles. It is a constitutional inability. Schlafrock und Pantofleln Not that! Never! I don't know whether I dare boast like a certain South American General who used to say that no emergency of war or peace had ever found him with his boots off but I may say that whenever the various periodicals mentioned in this book called on me to come out and blow the trumpet of personal Opinions or strike the pensive lute that speaks of the past, I always tried to pull on my boots first. I didn't want to do it, God knows Their Editors, to whom I beg to offer my thanks here, made me perform mainly by kindness but partly by bribery. Well, yes I Bribery? What can you expect? I never pretended to be better than the people in the next street or even in the same street. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.