The Fall of the Grand Sarrasin (Paperback)

Some people bring home a bundle of sketches from their summer holiday-water-colour memories of cliff, of sea, ruined castle, and ancient abbey. I brought back from the Channel Islands these pages here printed, as a kind of bundle of sketches in black and white, put together day by day as a holiday-task, and forming a string, as it were, on which the memories of ramble after ramble were threaded, rambles from end to end of Guernsey, and rambles, too, among the treasures of the Guille-Alles Library. I enjoyed my holiday all the better, as I peopled the cliffs and glens with the shadows of eight hundred years ago, and I hope that others may find some reality and some pleasure in the result as it is given here. If any inquire into the real historical foundations for the story, I refer them to the few notes at the end of the book, which will reveal without much doubt where fiction begins and fact ends. I hope I may be allowed a little license in the treatment of facts. There is-is there not?-a logic of fiction, as well as a logic of facts. At least there seemed to be as I wrote the story, and I hope no one who reads it will be inclined to quarrel with any part of it because its only basis is-imagination.