Excerpt from The Melody of God: And Other Papers Perhaps it ought to be said that none of the relatives or friends of the Empress have been consulted by me or have seen before publication what I have written. Courtesy might have appeared to demand a different course. But to have asked for advice which I might have had to reject or to involve others in a partial responsibility seemed most undesirable. There was one further consideration which definitely decided me. All her life the Empress Eugenie loved to meet journalists, authors, and men of letters, and both she and the Emperor ever welcomed them at the Tuileries. Indeed it cannot be forgotten that at no other Court in the world have they ever been given in the same measure the recognition and consideration which is their due. From the days of her girlish friend ship with Merimee in Paris till the day in 1919 when she received Mr. Wickham Steed, the Editor of The Times, at Farnborough Hill, Her Majesty was proud to acknowledge her keen sense of the power, dignity, and importance of the profession of the journalist and writer. Therefore, no one would have been more emphatic than the Em press that the writer must always and before all things retain and guard his freedom as a man of letters. 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.