I think I had a conception, but I don't think it made itself felt. What I wanted to do was to give the feeling of a vast tumult of life, as various and disorderly as possible, which should be cut short for a moment by the death, and go on again - and the whole was to have a sort of pattern, and be somehow controlled. The difficulty was to keep any sort of coherence, - also, to give enough detail to make the characters interesting ... I really wanted three volumes.







