Page:My Life and Loves.djvu/248

 Venus toute entiére à sa proie attchèe. Chapter XI.

meant to write nothing but the truth in these pages; yet now I'm conscious that my memory has played a trick on me: it is an artist in what painters call foreshortening: events, that is, which took months to happen, it crushes together into days, passing, so to speak, from mountain top to mountain top of feeling, and so the effect of passion is heightened by the partial elimination of time. I can do nothing more than warn my readers that in reality some of the love passages I shall describe were separated by weeks and sometimes by months, that the nuggets of gold were occasional "finds" in a desert.

After all, it cannot matter to my "gentle readers" and my good readers will have already divined the fact, that when you crush eighteen years into nine chapters, you must leave out all sorts of minor happenings while recording chiefly the important—fortunately these carry the message.

It was with my knowledge as with my passions: day after day I worked feverishly: whenever I met a passage such as the building of the bridge in Caesar, I refused to burden my memory with the dozens of new words because I thought, and still