The drawing of Eugenie made perhaps my chief pleasure in the story, combined with that of the two landscapes—­the two sharply contrasted landscapes—­Westmoreland and Versailles, which form its main background.  I find in a note-book that it was begun ’early in May, 1905, at Robin Ghyll.  Finished (at Stocks) on Tuesday night or rather Wednesday morning, 1 A.M., Dec. 6, 1905.  Deo Gratias!’ And an earlier note, written in Westmoreland itself, records some of the impressions amid which the first chapters were written.  I give it just as I find it: 

’The exquisiteness of the spring.  The strong-limbed sycamores with their broad expanding leaves.  The leaping streams, and the small waterfalls, white and foaming—­the cherry blossom, the white farms, the dark yews which are the northern cypresses—­and the tall upstanding firs and hollies, vigorously black against the delicate bareness of the fells, like some passionate self-assertive life....

’The “old” statesman B——.  His talk of the gentle democratic poet who used to live in the cottage before us.  “He wad never taeak wi the betther class o’ foak—­but he’d coom mony a time, an hae a crack wi my missus an me.”

’The swearing ploughman that I watched this morning—­driving his plough through old pastures and swearing at the horse—­“Dang ye!  Darned old hoss!  Pull up, will ye—­pull up, dang ye!”

’Elterwater, and the soft grouping of the hills.  The blue lake, the woods in tints of pale green and pinkish brown, nestling into the fells, the copses white with wind flowers.  Everywhere, softness and austerity side by side—­the “cheerful silence of the fells,” the high exhilarating air, dark tortured crags and ghylls—­then a soft and laughing scene, gentle woods, blue water, lovely outlines, and flower-carpeted fields.

’The exquisite colour of Westmoreland in May!  The red of the autumn still on the hills,—­while the bluebells are rushing over the copses.’

The little cottage of Robin Ghyll, where the first chapters were written, stands, sheltered by its sycamore, high on the fell-side, above the road that leads to the foot of the Langdale Pikes.  But—­in the dream-days when the Fenwicks lived there!—­it was the old cottage, as it was up to ten or fifteen years ago;—­a deep-walled, low-ceiled labourer’s cottage of the sixteenth century, and before any of the refinements and extensions of to-day were added.

The book was continued at Stocks, during a quiet summer.  Then with late September came fatigue and discouragement.  It was imperative to find some stimulus, some complete change of scene both for the tale and its writer.  Was it much browsing in Saint-Simon that suggested to me Versailles?  I cannot remember.  At any rate by the beginning of October we were settled in an apartment on the edge of the park and a stone’s throw from the palace.  Some weeks of quickened energy and more rapid work followed—­and