Excerpt from Fragments From Heloise Abelard The dates would not allow of a boy of eleven - eight and a half, eight and three-quarters, nine years old, perhaps, but no more; and the mind of nine and the mind of eleven are different minds, and the dialogue now allotted to Astrolabe is more childlike than the first, perhaps better in every way. But why, asks somebody, did you not think of all this at the time? There were a great many things to think of, critic. The twelfth century is full of things, all clamouring for utterance, and I being I, it was but human that I should fail to concentrate at a certain moment. The dates led me astray; I tripped, I fell. But why all this fuss about an additional chapter and the revision of Astrolabe's speech? Have all you who write in newspapers forgotten that whosoever wrote Hamlet revised it; that whosoever wrote Othello added to it, and that Balzac revised and rewrote, yet his works have lived longer than those of George Sand, who neither revised nor corrected? Wagner forgot to write the rushing passage for violins that takes Elizabeth down from her throne to the unfortunate Tannhauser, whose praise of Venus has roused the citizens to fury. It did not satisfy the French musicians who assembled in the Opera House to hear it in 1862, but it satisfies those who come after them. Landor revised - but why continue a list that does not pretend to be exhaustive? 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.