For I was already planning, vaguely, to begin on, later in that year,
"the book about Manuel." And now I had the germ of it,--in the instant
when Dom Manuel opens the over-familiar window, in his own home, to see
his wife and child, his lands, and all the Poictesme of which he was at
once the master and the main glory, presented as bright, shallow, very
fondly loved illusions in the protective glass of Ageus. I knew that the
fantastic thing which had not happened to me,--nor, I hope, to
anybody,--was precisely the thing, and the most important thing, which
had happened to the gray Count of Poictesme.

So I made that evening a memorandum of that historical circumstance; and
for some months this book existed only in the form of that memorandum.
Then, through, as it were, this wholly isolated window, I began to grope
at "the book about Manuel,"--of whom I had hitherto learned only, from
my other romances, who were his children, and who had been the sole
witness of Dom Manuel's death, inasmuch as I had read about that also,
with some interest, in the fourth chapter of "Jurgen"; and from the
unclosing of this window I developed "Figures of Earth," for the most
part toward, necessarily, anterior events. For it seemed to me--as it
still seems,--that the opening of this particular magic casement, upon
an outlook rather more perilous than the bright foam of fairy seas, was
alike the climax and the main "point" of my book.

Yet this fact, I am resignedly sure, as I nowadays appraise this
seven-year-old romance, could not ever be detected by any reader of
"Figures of Earth," In consequence, it has seemed well here to confess
at some length the original conception of this volume, without at all
going into the value of that conception, nor into, heaven knows, how
this conception came so successfully to be obscured.